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FILM PROBLEMS
OF SOVIET RUSSIA

RY BRYHER

Photographs Chosen and Titled by Kenneth Macpherson

RIANT CHATEAU

TERRITET

SWITZERLAND

CONTENTS

Chapter Page

List of Illustrations n*

Foreword 7

1. Introduction 9

II. Kulesiiop 18

III. Eisenstein ... 25

IV^ Pudovkin 44

V. Room . . .. ... 71

VI. The Sociological Film, 1 84

VII. The Sociological Film, II 92

VIII. The Wufku 99

• «

IX. Miscellaneous Films 105

X. Educational Films ... . 119

IX. Film Problems of Soviet Russia . .128

Sue .ESTIONS ... 131

Index 13G

Films Mentioned

138

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

The massacre in Potemkin fronhs-

piece

OPPOSITl PAOt

Potemkin. The Odessa people
. . * waving greeting . . 10

Detail from Potemkin 10

LeinstiakofI in Mother . . 11

Nicolai Batalof in Mother . . 11

L. Kuleshof 18

From Your Acquaintance by

Kuleshof 18

Expiation, Kuleshof's grim

maslerjuece . . . . 19

Edith reviles the murderer . . 19

The return to the cabin. From
Expiation . . , . . . 22

After the return . . . . 22

From Expiation . . . . 23

When the floods have subsided 23
S. M. Eisenstein . . . . 28

G. Alexandroff . . . . 28

From The General Line . . 29

A type-study from The General
Line . . . . . . 29

Taking a close-up for The

General Line . . . . 32

Ten Days That Shook The

World 33

One of the Women's Aimy . . 33

From Ten Days That Shook

The World 42

V, Pudovkin at work cutting
his film . . . . . , 43

visits her son in prison 50
The escape in Mother . . . . 60

Russia goes to war. The End
of St. Petersburg, . . . . 51

The hero of The End oj St.

Petersburg . . . . . . 56

From Pudovkin’s masterpiece.
Storm over Asia . . . . 67

Bair brings his fur to sell.

Storm over Asia , . . . 67

One of the Mongolian partici-
pants in Storm over Asia . . 70

Bair (Inkischmof) in Storm
over Asia . . . . . . 70

From The Death Ship. . . . 71

OPP.&UTBPAQB

Nicolai Batalof in Bed aifi Sofa 14i
Ludmila Semenova in Bed and
Sofa .. . .. 75

From The Death Ship. . . . 82

The Peasant Women of Pityian 83
Vassilissa and Anna . . • . . 83

Spring Festival in The Peasant
Women of Riazan . . . . 90

Nicolai andV assilissa in his smithy 90
The Last Attraction (Priobra-
shenskaya) . . . . ^ . 91

E. Cherviakoff as Pushkin in
Tsar and Poet . . 91

Anna Sten and C. Milschunn
in His Son . . . . 96

Hts Son . . . . . . 96

His Son . . . . . . 97

Moscow That Laughs and Weeps 98
The Yellow Identity Card 98

T wo Days . . . . . . 99

George Stabavoi . . . . 100

Minin and Samytchkovsky in
Two Days .. .. .. 101

Two Days . . . . . . 101

Eleven {The Eleventh Year) 102

Calumny . . . . 103

Nademsky in Zvenigora . . 104

Zventgora . . . . . . 104

The Arsenal . . . . . . 106

Jimmy Niggtns . . . . 106

Assya . . . . . . . . ' 108

House in the Trubnaya Square 108
Revolt in Kasan . . . . 109

The Captain* s Daughter 109

Kastus Kalinov ski .. ..112

A. Woizck in The Forty First. . 112

L. Trauberg .. ..113

G. Konsintzofi ^ • • . . 113

Movies to Villages . . . . 122

Love in Nature . . . 122

The Country of Tchuvasn^^ . . 123

The Workers' Spartakiada . . 128

A Human-Being is Born . . 129

The Laces 129

B. Barnet . . . . . . 130

A shot for The Workers' Spat'-

takiada . . 130

FOREWORD

We have endeavored to make the information in the following
pages as accurate as possible. Unless otherwise stated, I have
seen myself all the films described. Whenever possible I have
collected biographical data from the directors themselves. Where
I have not been able to do this, I have got the information direct
frofh Moscow.

I should like to thank the Russiche Handelsvertretung in Berlin,
Derussa and Prometheus for having shown me so many of the
films mentioned, often in an uncut version with the original Russian
sub-titles; Miss W. Ray for having undertaken the translation
of many Russian letters and documents, and the many Russians
in Moscow and Berlin who have furnished me with data and
photographs. My thanks are particularly due to P. Attasheva and
the Sovietsky Ekran for verifying and sending through dates and
also details of forthcoming productions.

• BRYHER.

Switzerland, 1922.

CHAPTER I.

Introduction.

up to last summer I had seen only four Russian films, three in
Switzerland and one in Germany. But we took the aeroplane
service to Berlin last July, having been promised that we could see
there the output of a whole season.

I like flying. I do not want to fly an aeroplane myself; what
I like is to get the landscape in perspective. Whoever started the
idqjL that it was impossible to appreciate the view from an altitude?
It is the only way really to see a country, to see it from a plane.
Fields and tiny hills and woods mass themselves together like a
crowd Eiscnstein is directing; their place in a whole becomes
apparent, all their characteristics and problems, instead of a tiny
piece of them, become revealed. One can see why the road turned
exactly at that point and why there is a bend in the stream. Even
the colors in a landscape become new and the earth is flat as a
screen upon which shadow and wind and the aeroplane itself project
pictures.

• However, as we neared a lake that day the engine began to
make peculiar noises ; all the sounds, in fact, that should not happen
in a plane. And an official of sorts turned round, his face white
and red in spots, and grunted in German, “ We are about to
crash.”

(1 think he actually said we might be going to crash, but between
my limited knowledge of the language and the terrific noise of the
engine, I understood the first meaning.)

I looked out — on a bank of trees. Immediately the shot of the
aeroplane crashing in a swift slant through branches in Reni
Clair’s Prey of the Wind came into my mind. (It is curious what
a difffrence direction makes to a picture. Those few shots in

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

^Clair’s poorest film gave me more sense of flight thany^i the
elaborate photography of Wings.) ^ We plunged, it seemed to me
by this time, erratically, over tree top and stumps of branches,
and all I could do was to sit still and see alternately our own
position and Ren^ Clair’s picture.

, I had always thought that one advantage of air travel was that
if anything happened, it would happen quickly. It is foolish to
form pre-conceived notions, for there we sat, for twenty minutes,
while the aeroplane jerked its way back with unpleasing onjinous
noises to the aerodrome, with oil heated to over a hundred degrees
and the constant risk of fire. And as we got out on to firm ground
olTicials said sorrowfully and angrily, “ You do not appear to realise
}Ou were in great danger.”

And I have never ceased wondering what we were expected to
do. Scream? But against the noise of the engine we should have
remained unheard. Faint? Surely unwise with a prospeot of
crashing. Have hysterics? Again the engine. It is a problem
impossible of solution.

And yet the incident reflects the problem of this book. For the
slock phrase of Fleet Street is ” the enjoyment of Russian films is
a species of hysteria.” Yet the aerodrome officials were pained
by our absence of hysteria : they scolded us for it, in fact, as if
we had been naughty children. On the other hand, our German
friends were politely amused that we mentioned it : ” Oh, that is
nothing to the time I was forced down in a gale into a swamp,”
Or casually : ” Of course, it is irritating to lose an hour on your
time of arrival.” So, on the one hand we were blamed for not
making a fuss, and on the other laughed at for mentioning the
affair at all. And the actual circumstance was that it w^as a most
unpleasant twenty minutes, but there was absolutely nothing you
could do about it. And this is precisely what happens when it
comes to questions connected with Russia in England. Because
it is not possible, apparently, to discuss Russian films as art; all
sorts of extraneous questions have to be dismissed first. How
can you see anything in those dreadful Russians, somebody queries,
and then another person sniffs, but your opinions are quite retro-
gressive from a revolutionary point of view. And someone else

INTRODUCTION

No compromise,” and again, another, ” But they have
criticised the Army ” (quite forgetting the usual English criticisni
of the Red Guard). Until finally one wonders where, in all this
riot of ” talkies,” Russian film art belongs.

Either, it appears, you must be prepared to bayonet your aunt
because she wont read Karl Marx, or else you must leave tl\e
room because Potemkin is mentioned. Either you must say that
England can do no wrong or else scream ” Down with England.”
Wh^ mercifully throughout English history every self-respecting
Englishman criticised the country hard and got so annoyed with it
that he often left it, which put us in the position we now enjoy
instead of our remaining a race of quarrelling savages.

Art has little to do with politics, but a great deal to do with trulh.
Whenever I read in The Times Educational Supplement that there
are one hundred and sixty thousand children studying in con-
demned buildings, I become as revolutionary as anybody. When-
ever I read a Communist leaflet urging dismissal from consideration
of every idea unconnected with its immediate policy, I become
equally irritated. Russia has made a brave and an interesting
experiment : it is difficult to think of any compromise being possible
in a land that had been so oppressed and so neglected. More than
half the population were left before the war a prey to disease and
famine, without education and without medical aid. The situation
in England is utterly different. We need, it is true, a psychological
revolution, and that will come. But we are unprepared for it as
^yet and it wdll take us a generation, perhaps fifty years, to accom-
plish. And it will begin, I think, in England, rather in the middle
classes. In the long course of evolution Russia and England
probably will meet, but England wull go by a quite different path
and it will develop in a quite other manner.

The present attitude to Russian films in England is dangerous
onr account of the inconceivable stupidity of the authorities. They
are investing a w^ork of art with the terror and power which the
forest negro credits to a fetish. Say Potemkin and it appears that
the whole British Army wdll go dowm one after another like ninepins.
(Mr. Meisel, for instance, w^as refused a visa for some time because
he happened to have composed music for this film. Pudovkin

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

lands on a week’s permit, guarded and muzzled, and th^^idite
* forget he fought with the Allies thrpugh the war, and shoufa there-
fore have been received with appropriate honor.) Germany has
had a /-evolution, too, and Austria has suffered as bitter starvation
as ever happened in Russia and they have seen Russian films for
the last three years and nothing dire has happened. I, as a free-born
"English citizen, insist on my right to see what I like, read what I
like, and say what I like. And where is our boasted English
liberty if I am to be searched at the customs for books which half
the authors of England have certified have literary value, and ftenied
the chance of studying the greatest films of the world because they
happen to portray a revolution that every self-respecting English-
man was glad had happened? I object to being considered less
able to consider problems for myself than a Frenchman, or a
German or a Swiss. And what I want to know of any English
Government is not w'hether it believes in capitalism or communism,
but what it is going to do about the education problem (both in
England, India and Africa), what constructive steps it is taking to
reduce unemployment and, most important of all, what it is going
to do about the censorship.

But, say the critics, Russian films are not art, they are hysteria
partially induced by mass-feeling and hysterical music.

I saw a dozen of these films last summer in small projection
rooms without music at nine in the morning, and they were art —
as the Elizabethans were art — and they were truth. The full
descriptions of the films follow m these pages. But every time' I
saw one I was ashamed because it was only a handful of us seeing
it, and I knew what it would mean to scores of English people 1
know, to see their thoughts, and their problems, set dowm in these
films. And having seen Ten Days, The Peasant Women of
Riazan, His Son, The End of St, Petersburg and Potemkin in
the space of five days, I felt that first I wanted to know everything
about modern Russia I could and then that I must certainly try
and make a map of what 1 saw and learnt so that it was open to
those English interested to know what had been done, what could
be seen abroad, what to look for if they went to Germany, and the
chief names of directors, films, cameramen and actors. I realise,

INTRODUCTION

ru!>¥(^roperly to write the book I ought to go to Moscow. Perhaps
one day 1 shall be able to go thpre. *

But information was not easily obtained. Authority having set
up a fetish, English revolutionaries set up a fetish too. A, it
appears, was a revolutionary in 1908 and may know something or
other that took place in Russia, but he is guarded by B. Before^ne
can get access to B one must be examined by C as to one’s English"
political opinions. As these do not appear to be very concise one
is referred to D, and while there hears from E that A has not got
the information desired. One therefore leaves in an aura of sus-
picion from both parties. After a few of these endeavours it
seemed, and was, much simpler to apply direct to headquarters
in Moscow or to their officials abroad, who gave simply, directly
and courteously all the data 1 wanted.

I have tried to give in the following pages essential information
plainly and objectively. I hope to follow this volume with a larger
one (if they will let me go to Moscow some summer), which will
really contain the history in full of the Russian cinema.

I shall not attempt to give in detail any long account of the early
history of the Russian cinema, although I have a list of over fifty
films. But as I have seen none of them, and as they are not now
likely to be exported, except for some exhibition of cinema history,
it has seemed better to concentrate upon the films of recent years.

The Nationalisation of the Cinema was decreed in 1919. At
t^^t^time only a few kinos were open, chiefly in Leningrad and
other large cities, and the production side was almost at a stand-
still. Most of the equipment of the studios had been destroyed,
and it is even said that one or two of the first films made, after the
Revolution, were photographed with four or five Jupiter lamps
only ; barely the equipment that is considered necessary by an
amateur photographer. The first films exported were taken by
Germany, and gradually a few foreign films found their way into
Russia. More equipment w^as purchased, more and more films
were made, travelling cinemas were instituted, and the various
organisations, such as the Meschrabpom-Russ and the Gosvoyen-
kino, developed their activities. It was the success abroad of

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Potemkin, in 1924, that turned the mind of Europe towards the
.cinematographic development of Russia. /^ ‘

Three films of that transition peAod have been shoWn, I think,
in England; The Postmaster, directed by Jeliabushky, after
Pushkin’s story, from a scenario by Ozep, with Moskvin, Tamarin
and Malinovskaya in the chief parts; The Marriage of the Bear,
directed by K. Eggert; and Morosko, which was also directed by
Jeliabushky, a fairy-tale, and made in Russia for children. While
these are all interesting as showing the beginnings of modern
development, and as examples of what can be made under imq^ense
difficulties, they are not of the standard of many of the more recent
pictures. They should be seen, however, if possible, by those
interested in the development of the Russian cinema.

The chief cinema organisations in Russia at present are the
Sovkino, Meschrabpom-Russ, Wufku, and the Gosvoycnkino.
There are also the Goskinprom in Georgia, with headquarters at
Tiflis, the Belgoskino in White Russia, the Armenkino in Armenia,
the Uzbekgoskino in Uzbekistan, and the Tchuvashkino in the
Autonomous Tchuvash Republic.

The Sovkino has three studios in Moscow and one in Leningrad
and turns out annually about B5 pictures, together with a number
of culture and topical films. It employs about twenty-two produc-
ing groups. Meschrabpom-Russ employs ten groups, turns out
about 15 pictures a year, and has its studio in Moscow. The
Gosvoycnkino was established to provide films for the education of
the Red Army and the Navy. It has made about fifty films in the
past eighteen months and has also headquarters in Moscow. **

The methods of making a film in Russia are quite different from
those in any other country. The composition of the film is the
important matter, and the chief consideration is the effect, and not
the actors. Cutting, again, is considered far more important than
the story. (As there seems to exist a little confusion in some minds
as to what cutting actually is, the following explanation may be
useful. A length of usually four hundred feet is loaded into the
camera at a time. When taken and the film developed it will
contain several different scenes. For instance, A may enter a
room, walk to the window, lean out and call to B standing in the

INTRODUCTION

street. This may be “ cut ** in different ways. It may be taken
'as described, but it will probably be found that A took a
?ttle too long over his walk ansi then a few feet of A will be cut
from the negative. Or A may be shown, from four or five different
angles or when he looks out of the window, several shots may be
inserted to give the effect either of what he sees or what his mood
is, of the moment. More concisely, each picture is a word. Jur^^Me
them together anyhow and you get a child’s first composition. Fit
them together at varying speeds and you get poetry. Usually the
Russians go in for very swift cutting, as when Eisenstein, in Ten
Days, gives the effect of the crowd by quick flashes of different
faces from different angles. Some of the Germans and Swedes,
on the other hand, are noted for their slowness, as they may allow
a hundred feet or more of film merely to the opening of a door.)

The actors in Russia are a secondary consideration and when
possible, for at any rate the crowd scenes, actual workers are taken
who have not been photographed before. Whole factories volun-
teer or squadrons of the Red Army. The final decision and
complete control is given to the director.

But how does one become a director or cameraman, or even actor
in Russia?

*:^Chiefly through the State School of Cinematography at Moscow.
This was founded in 1919, to train directors, actors, cameramen,
lighting experts and assistants. By a special Government decree
all the studios are obliged to give a certain number of places yearly
to graduates from the school. Pupils are also sent to work in the
sttidibs during the summer and are often used where crowds, etc.,
are required. The course is three years for a director and tw^o for
an actor. Industrial qualification (actual work in studios) is also
required after leaving. They are obliged to study the technique
of cinematography in detail, psychology, the history of art, cos-
tume, dramatic literature, anatomy, make up, rhythmics,
acrobatics, acting, sociology and the science of photography.
After the first three months, one Russian told me, those unlikely
to prove suitable arc weeded out. It is a very difficult course to
complete. There is also the Leningrad Photo Cinema School,
where cameramen, lighting experts and men for the printing and

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

' developing laboratories are trained. The Ukraine has nQjwi**^
f school of cinematography similar tp the one in Mosco>y, anS ther\
are courses for the training of actors in Leningrad. It is expected
that other schools in different parts of the country will be founded
in timd on the same lines. Once through the school, however, they
are not afraid of youth, but a young director, after some actual
experience in the industry, will soon get a chance to make a film.

All films when finished are submitted to about twenty people to
ensure that they are sound from a Communist view point. This
does not mean that the films must be political in character, but
they must not contain diametrically opposed ideas. The film is then
submitted to an audience of workers, and if they do not care for
it, it is sent back for alterations. Actually 1 was told in Berlin, by
Russian directors, that they prefer wwking in Russia to working
abroad, as abroad it was necessary to supervise all details per-
sonally, whereas in Russia everyone worked together and their
minds were free merely to direct. I question myself, however,
whether the multitude of criticism will be good for cinemato-
graphy ; not now, but in five years time, as insensibly a tradition
will develop which will mean that films may be rejected because
they present a new point of view. But perhaps the situation will
be adjusted.

Every effort is made to interest the workers in the cinema and
to make them feel it is a part of their life. It seems a pity that
travelling cinemas could not be provided for some of the villages
in England and that English film companies should not rely ra^h<;«“
on unspoilt native material than on taking extras always that have
probably migrated from the theatre.

There are many cinema magazines published in Russia ; many of
these are illustrated. There are also numbers of books issued on
the cinema and its problems. There is a Museum, and a Cinema
Cabinet was founded in Moscow to study the theoretical aspects
of the subject, the question of teaching, etc., and to report on the
best foreign films. A great number of reports have been issued.

The studios suffered from lack of equipment for some time;
occasionally the resources of several had to be borrowed to enable
them to photograph a big scene, but matters are now improving

1 «

INTRODUCTION

D^^hsic, Camereclair and Path6 are the chief cameras in use, with
-^^fa and Eastman stock.

The main ciifFerence between the Russian and the foreign film
is not one of politics but psychology ; American, English, and most
foreign films are not allowed to be founded upon psycholog/, but
must conform to a standard of “ conventional morals ** issued^. in
printed form by the censorship departments and which are happily
rare in real life.

CHAPTER II.

Kuleshof.

Russia was swept by revolution. And it is well before beginning
any consideration of the Russian cinema to consider what that
was. For it is never, as people seem to imagine, a sudden thing,
the hasty flaring temper of a destructive child, smashing plate and
vase and chair into fragments for sheer joy of smashing. No
rebellion arises squall-like, suddenly, but is the outcome of perhaps
centuries of growth (whether active, as was the French or the
peasants under Tyler, or passive, as the Puritaqi^ and Quakers) ;
it is the' answer to petty tyranny and bitter oppression of thousands
of families during several generations. Grandfathers who have
rebelled in small ways may have been silenced for their generation,
but the psychic effect of their punishment stamped on the minds
of the next generation and the next, moves finally a great mass
forward into refusal of this or that particular type of injustice.

For a hundred years unrest had stirred in Russia. Illiteracy,
oppression and want ground against a rigid caste system ofjpripg
little of value or outlet to those favored by it. It w^as said, for
instance, that there was one doctor to about every five thousand
eight hundred people, as against one to every four hundred in
England. And that, as most of these lived in cities, there was
only one doctor, roughly, to meet the needs of twenty thousand
peasants. Education was provided for only a small minoiity.
There was little chance for the intelligent person to employ his
gifts usefully, for if he were a peasant a thousand feudal restric-
tions hemmed him in, and if belonging to more favored classes
his views were usually regarded with disfavor by the authorities.
So Russia sprawled, an illiterate weight between the East and

F ixirn \ ~<iur quaint,

1>\ \y. Ivulfshnf, A C’hocklox a Cwht) played Kdjth
Jivptatif/n) and Ferdinatulof .

t» »r oi unn< 1 ol the " Kiis'

ts lu“i matlcli*nc 1.1 hush.mti li«»ni tlisti

KiiK sju)t 's fit ITU mistitpi
inrthtul \(tfi lilt nitiiiJits iMlithpii

thf

KULESHOF

Europe, having the advantages of neither and the
^isadvantag;es of both. •

The revolutionary attempts of 1905 failed. Unrest and
repression grew together. Upon the outbreak of strife in 1914 it
was freely said, “ War will save Russia from a revolution.**

From 1914 to 1917 — war. ^

Think back and remember 1917 in England. Food queues
stretching in the rain. Air-raids. Influenza. Provisions
growing less, people growing weaker, people losing hope, and the
constant attrition of the population from wounds, disease, sub-
marine sinkings and aerial warfare. How many men and women
in 1917, in England, where conditions were more tolerable than
in some of the war-ravaged countries, did not feel that death was
preferable to waiting without hope?

The Russians went through this, together with no properly
organised system of medical attention or leave for the soldiers, and
with poverty and starvation increasing for the women and children
in the villages and towns.

Think again. Many men drafted into the English army could
not stand the horrors and uniformity of life in the trenches. They
were passed out as shell-shocked or actually insane. It is said
that definite attempts were made to keep their numbers unknown
because of the effect on the nation, and that the casualties from
mental strain were greater than those caused by many dangerous
d^se^es. But a man drafted into the English army could write
to his family and receive letters, he had reasonable expectation of
occasional leave, and knew that if he were ill or wounded some sort
of medical attention would be forthcoming. He knew, also, that
his wife would receive a small allowance.

But the Russian soldier was taken from his village or town and
neither he nor his wife knew if they would see each other again.
He could seldom read or write. Quite often he did not know why
he was fighting. He knew that, with notable exception, if he
were ill or wounded the chance of proper medical attention was
remote. (Even in the English newspapers there were occasional
hints of the horrors of the situation.) Then many Englishmen

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

had a definite aim in fighting at the beginning. They believed
' were saving their own possessioas, because they knew that iA
England were defeated, the factories where they worked, the small
shops .they owned, the fishing smacks they sailed, would be
destroyed also. But the Russian was suffering incredible hard-
jshifs for the sake of a regime which oppressed and ignored him ,*
he knew he would return not to re-building a home or a business,
but to more hardships and to forging tighter his already intolerable
chains.

In 1917 starvation accomplished what ideals had faiTed to
achieve. If lives were to be lost anyway, they might as well be
lost for definite hope of betterment, and not for the pleasure of
those in power, whose actions had led to war and its consequences.
The story of what happened can be seen in Ten Days That Shook
the World,

But even revolution cannot completely alter the daily necessities
of life. There are habits (conditional reflexes, perhaps) that
cannot easily be surrendered without a sensation of loss, even if
bullets are flying about the street. People look for breakfasr on
waking or buy a newspaper in the evening, in spite of barricades.
So war and after-effects of war and revolution and daily habits of
life, re-adjustment to civilian conditions, finding food, making
newspapers, tangled together in the rebuilding of a nation. Big
ideas were suddenly halted by apparently unimportant details.

The first problem in post-revolution Russia was education.^

The second was for something to take the minds of people from
themselves and the turmoils about them and to provide a bridge
from the destruction of war to the construction of peace.

Only one thing existed capable of being used as a solution to
these problems, by reason of its cheapness when applied to vast
masses, and because of its direct appeal ; this was the cinema.

Films had been made in Russia haphazardly since 1908, entirely
by private individuals upon sheerly commercial principles. Before
1914 a certain number of foreign films entered the country, but
during the war, supplies being cut off, almost all foreign films had
disappeared from the screen.

KULESHOF

In December, 1917, a special Cinema Commission was organised
.it Leningrad at the People’s Coqfimissariat of Education. By 1919 *
the industry was nationalised and placed under the control of the
State.

Sometime during these years, while Russia was swe^'pt by
revolution and counter revolution, war-adjustment, famine aqd
necessity, a Russian named Kuleshof founded a school m
cinematography.

Lev Vladimirovitch Kuleshof was born in 1899 and began to
work at cinematography in 1916 with Khanzhonkof, as assistant
manager and artist, under the director of Bauer. After the death
of the latter he worked independently as a manager. His first
experience in the construction of American staging was the picture,
The Scheme of the Engineer, PraiU In 1917 he joined the firm
of Kozlovsky-Yourief. Then in 1918 he worked at the photo-
graphy of chronicles at the Gos-Kino. In the photography of
these chronicles American scenic methods were employed for the
first time. From 1921 he worked in G.LK. as teacher and as
member of the management. In 1920 he formed a company, with
which he has been working down to the present time.

From one point of view their problem was easy. There were no
renters to insist that “ a dancing ” must be included in the picture,
nor censors to forbid the showing, say, of a film like Joyless Street,
because it was preferable not to let the masses see a story of
starving Vienna.

Kuleshof is said to be one of the pioneers of Russian cinemato-
graphy. Only one of his films (an excellent example of the
modern method) has been shown to date outside of Russia. This is
Siihne, which has been shown throughout Germany and Sw^itzer-
land ; the English title is Expiation, and in France it was called
Dura Lex. It is made from a story by Jack London.

This film is rough and wild and brooding as the tempest it
portrays ; the northern night on the fringes of civilization. It is
a rough sketch combining many features that were to emerge so
strongly in the second period of Russian cinematography ; the
period ^o which belong Mother and Potemkin. It hints the

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

lyricism of Pudovkin, when blossoms break about the floating hut
in spring. Its psychology links ^n to later method.,, Murder is
done and justice made into a name for the sake of gold and a
stagnant system of morals. The piling up of horror over months
was la*ter to be condensed into the sharp inevitability of Two Days,
The making of nature the centre and the figures subsidiary, recalls
Ine Forty First.

The story itself is simple. Man and wife, two other men, and
their servant Jack, have dug summer long for gold. Winter in
the wilds is upon them, jack, the servant (played by V. Fogel),
discovers the gold, but is not entitled to share in it. As the
monotonous days pass waiting for the spring, they amuse them-
selves describing what they w'ill do with the riches and now and
then mocking Jack, who will have nothing to show on his return.
Someone jeers once too often. Jack snatches up his gun, there are
shots, fighting. Two are dead on the floor, upset food .spills across
a table. It is tragedy, this. And the servant, the murderer, lies
bound, with husband and wife staring down at him.

In the storm, sliding over ice, through driving snow, they
struggle with two bodies strapped to sledges. Frozen. They
hack a hole in the ice. The prisoner, strapped too tightly to save
himself, slides down the plank out of the hut. Rain beats on him.
Rain that is like knives. The woman drags him back into the hut.
Day in, day out, they keep watch. First one sleeps while the other
holds the gun. Shoot, begs the prisoner in the corner, but that
would not be justice. They are all gradually going mad. * Arid
spring comes.

It is the wife, Edith’s birthday. She looses the man, they sit
at table together. And now there is no going back to a gun and
bondage. But justice must be satisfied. Under a picture of
Queen Victoria (with folded hands) they judge him guilty of
murder.

This scene has the quality of the trial in Mother. Justice
meaning so little and so much. The hard and fast measuring rod
taking account neither of essential truth nor psychological
difference. Except that wdiere sympathy can fall but on one side

KULESHOF

in M other f here it falls both sides. With Edith’s madness grow-
ing and witl} her sympathy so apxious to be convinced this justice
is not the right one, but unable to dare enough to discount the
law she has learned.

In Ihe beginning again of storm Jack is hung to a tree. 'Peace
does not come to Edith’s heart, though act has been meted with
act, violence with violence. She huddles against the wall of tfi?
hut with her husband. The wind blows, the door opens. Jack
stands at the door. The branch had broken. He takes up some
gold fAim the table and flings the rope at them, for “ the rope of
a hanged man is said to bring luck.” And it ends as it began, with
ferocious darting rain and storm and wind.

Siihjie is great and imperfect and chaotic. It is not a pleasant
film to watch because, as in all Russian films, one is caught up
into it as if one were actually there, watching these events, having
to decide one’s self if this is justice or that cruelty. But to
appreciate the greatness of the film compare it to any Hollywood
gold rush super epic. With The Trail of *98, for instance, which
is reputed to have cost so many hundred thousand dollars, with its
stars, and its hundreds of extras and its perfect equipment of
laboratories and cameras. Never for one instant did The Trail
of '98 give an impression of hardship. Of heroism. Of the awful
tight that is the nortli — with nature.

For there is terror in snow, that blots out trails. There is
insanity in monotony of cold. The wind can choke — far enough
tft th? north — as easily as gas can, or water.

And there is with the terror beauty.

And Suhne had both these things. Psychological horror, horror
of almost supernatural intensity. The sensation of monotony.
And the will to live in defiance of encouragement to die. And for
beauty the first blossoms, the hut floating on sun-broken ice water,
and the extraordinary loveliness of the woman who was Edith, A.
Chocklova.

People have said she is ugly. Even it is said that this is the
reason that she acts no more in films. But how can the superficial
prettiness of an average Hollywood heroine be preferred to this

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

creature that has madness and greatness in her face and move-
ments, the quality of snow and <the grace of elk scenting storm
suddenly among bare branches? Whose hands move as very far
north, Iceland poppies (that have no colour) move against wind.
It mifst have been the first time, considering the date, that mind
was shown on the screen, instead of merely body.

Suhne was shown throughout Germany about a couple of years
ago by the Deutsch-Nordische Film Union. It was then released
in Switzerland and was shown in the more specialised cinemas in
France. It has never been shown in England. It is a Sovkino
production, and was photographed by Kusnetzov.

There is no propaganda in it except truth, and there is no reason
why it should not be shown freely throughout England. A full
appreciation of Suhne by H. D. appeared in Close Up for Mav,
1928.

Kuleshof is a pioneer of cinematographic development. He has
directed On the Red Front, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr.
West in the Country of the Bolsheviki (this is said to be an
extremely amusing comedy of the adventures of an American who
arrives in Russia believing all the tales commonly published about
it in the popular press and who falls into the hands of some
adherents of the old regime, v/ho, in order to exploit him, pretend
to protect him from imaginary dangers), The Death Ray, a fan-
tastic story of w'hich the action passes in Russia and abroad,
According to the Law (Expiation), Your Woman Friend and The
Cheerful Canary. • ’

CHAPTER III.

Eisenstein.

When I was a child I saw a group of conscripts marched through
the Paris streets. I was too young to be a pacifist, being about
eight, with all my natural inclinations towards fighting. But the
spectacle remained bitten into my memory as degradation. For
the crowd nudged each other and whispered ‘‘ les conscrits ” and
the men marched between two lines of soldiers. From the picture
I understood tyranny. For it is only what the mind experiences
that makes understanding.

Later on I hated the idea of Russia. It seemed formless and
tyrannical. Ponderous of landscape. Sprawled over the map
without shape. Heavy with force. I read, as a matter of duty,
translations of the Russian classic authors and hated them for their
formless, introspective nibblings at existence. Life was dreadful,
but they didn’t seem to have any constructive plan about it. So,
though I felt early that I wanted to accept all countries on an equal
irtterlfational basis, I knew it would be hardest to accept Russia.

When the Revolution came I was vaguely interested. It must
be remembered that in 1917 one was in no condition to accept
freshly any nation’s experiment in which one’s interest was merely
abstract. The personal problems about one’s own country were
sufficiently difficult to preclude the diffusion of what small energy
the War left one into such distant channels. And it is not
generally realized abroad how strict the English censorship of news
was. Quite well-informed people have said to me since : “ But
did you really have a food shortage in England? Was there
really discomfort experienced through the air-raids?” In 1917,
and foi; some years after, only those English who had been

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

interested in Russian revolutionary attempts before the War
continued their interest in Russia? For the mass of 'the English,
their own recuperative problems and their own desire to work
out ap improvement of conditions at home, kept them for a time
from examining the Russian situation. A proof of this is the fact
^at looking over books on the Revolution written in English,
nearly all of them between 1917 and 1925 will be found to have
been written by Americans. For America was not exhausted, but
merely provoked, stirred up and excited over the War, and for
that reason most of the protests and many of the best appraise-
ments of the folly of strife have come out of America. They had
a bad time for a few months, but enough strength left to protest
afterwards. In Europe it was usually the rebels who got shot
first, and the few that survived wanted only to forget and to
escape even from thought of protest.

I myself did not follow the Revolution carefully. Except that
1 was glad it had happened, and 1, of course, discounted the stories
of atrocities. Not that again one did not realize (from one’s
studies of the French Revolution) that many unpleasing incidents
and some injustice must have taken place. But one cannot dis-
count responsibility, and one could not help feeling from what one
had read of France in the eighteenth century, that if one class
deliberately refuses education to another they are asking for trouble
if anything happens and cannot therefore expect much sympathy.
Though I was not, and am not now, interested very deenly in
politics. For politics seldom touch vital aspects of life. Ques-
tions of justice or health or progress. These get lost under party
politics and intrigue, whether red or white or black happens to be
in power. The soul of the world can be changed only by attack-
ing conditions from a psychological point of view, not a
conventional one, whether it be the convention of the Left or the
convention of the Right.

It is true that psychological knowledge has only been available
for a few years, thanks to Freud, the pioneer, and to other forces
and experiments. Even Russia has not yet dared to attack
environment from a completely straight point of view. Even

EISENSTEIN

Russia is still tied up, for the most part, to its own conception
of morals. . •

So, as I repeat, I did not study the Revolution. While it was
utterly impossible for me to sympathize with pre-War white
Russia, I could not agree with the revolutionary sympathizers in
England who concentrated their emotions upon what was and is,
to me, a false idea. That is, politics. What I wished to discover
was the possibility of an entirely different life.

The country that then interested me was America. But having
studiecf it for many years, it seemed to me that they were not so
advanced in many respects as Europe. They were not so tolerant.
And by laying stress upon the outward symbols of community
life tliey tended to destroy independence, while the real facing of
human problems was obscured by prohibitions ; although on the
surface they appeared to have greater freedom of choice than
Europeans have. As an example of what I mean, one has only
to instance the average American attitude towards the negro
question, and those of its citizens who find it preferable to live in
Europe. They seem so seldom able to realize that the very
pioneer spirit that drove the grandfather across the Atlantic and
across the prairies may, after two generations, force the grandchild
as legitimately back. With excellent result to Europe, where
already many children of mixed American-European parentage
have achieved distinction.

It was not until I saw Bed and Sofa that I discovered Russia.
U \vm the first film to attack life itself, as opposed to politics.
It is silly to speak of a new world. It was not that, but something
infinitely more exciting. It was this world taking a step forward.

From that day I began to read all I could about Russia and to
see every Russian film available. And the story of modern Russia
is so inseparably bound up with the Revolution that it is essential
to see, if possible, Eisenstein’s Ten Days and Pudovkin’s End of
St Petersburg,

Ten Days — it is true I have an historical mind — I feel is the
greatest film yet made. This is not the accepted opinion, I
know^, for Berlin is said to prefer Pudovkin's End of St,
Petersburg, but for myself I like Eisenstein’s swiftness and

# 27

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

hardness and impenetrable inhumanity, which is perhaps the
greatest humanity. Pudovkin has characters, but Eisenstein has
events. I have seen it three times, and each time it lifts the
mind higher until one feels as actually as if one were in a swift
aeroplane, that indescribable sensation of leaving the ground with
^gines gathering speed and mountains dropping beneath one.

It is hard to understand why Ten Days has not been shown in
England. I had always thought the English had a sense of fair
play. I have said and written that the English were often stupid
beyond belief and wasteful, but that they had, more than FrVnch or
Italian or American, a sense of abstract justice. I still believe
this of a mass of English. But I shall soon have to accept it as
another illusion if films such as Ten Days, full of dignity and
beauty, are forbidden, while any film is permitted that shows some
aristocratic Russian female snatching her virginity in the nick of
time from a howling mob and flying in heavy furs pursued by
wolves across the frontier.

For the one thing I have yet to find in a Russian film is vulgarity.
Sometimes they are not true to type, sometimes they are dull,
exaggerated or conventional. But I cannot remember seeing any
vulgar scene, which is such a welcome change when so many
made-to-pattern pictures rely on vulgarity alone to get across.

Eisenstein was, of course, the first Russian to be universally
knowm abroad, owing to the amazing success of Potemkin. He
w^as born in Riga, in the north of Russia, in 1898, and was trained
as an engineer and architect. From his early childhood he showed
great aptitude for drawing. He finished his studies at the time
of the War and entered the Institute of Civil Engineers at Lenin-
grad as a student. He became very interested in the Renaissance,
and particularly in Leonardo da Vinci, in 1916. It was w’hile he
W'as studying the personality of the great Italian that he discovered
Freud’s book, Concerning the Childhood Reminiscences of Da
Vinci. This study impressed him so much that he began to make
a serious study of the teaching of Freud, and he is still an adherent
of the materialistic portion of Freud’s teaching. He was also
attracted by the Japanese drama and art comedy. In 1918 he
entered the Red Army as a volunteer, and worked at the , front on

dirf.'tf>r of rhf (jerietdl I nif

EISENSTEIN

field-fortification. In 1920 he began to work as an artist with one
of the theatrical companies at ^e front. Demobilised in the
autumn of 1920» he went to Moscow, where he entered the Academy
of the General Staff in the Eastern Section. There he met the
director of the first workers* theatre in the world and shortly after-
wards joined the staff of this theatre in the capacity of manager
of the theatrical decoration department. His first work was the
staging of Jack London’s story, The Mexican. He worked the
following year with Meyerhold, but soon separated from him. In
1923 heimade his first independent picture, It is a Good Horse That
Never Stumbles, from the play by the classic writer, Ostrovsky,
which was converted into a circus farce.

Some time previously Eisenstein studied the teaching of Marx
and made it the basis of his world outlook, having previously
passed through all the stages of idealistic philosophy. In 1922
he became acquainted with the reflexological school of Pavlof, and
practically and theoretically applied this materialistic system to
the domain of artistic creation. In 1924 he began to work at
cinematography and constructed his first mass film. The Strike.

I tried to see this film in Berlin, as a copy was sent there some
time ago. Through the courtesy of the editor of Film Technik
a hunt began which ended finally in a joke. And must have cost
quite a pound in telephone calls ! As far as it could be discovered
The Strike had been bought by firm A, who, unable to dispose of
it, sold it to firm B, w’ho in turn sold it to C, who held it in storage.
After l:he success of Potemkin, firm A re-bought the picture at a
bigger price than they had sold it for originally, but being still
timorous of its success sold it to firm D. And then it disappeared.
There seemed to be a rumor that it had been cut up for topicals,
but I cannot be sure of this, for at this moment my German gave
out with my temper. At any rate, it was cut up and destroyed.
Reliable critics who have seen it tell me that while it had some
excellent moments, notably one where the police turned hoses on
strikers running up steps in mid-winter, so that they were driven
back by the water freezing on them, it was by no means as interest-
ing as one would have imagined knowing Eisenstein *s later work.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

I should have preferred to form my own opinion, however, and
hope a copy has been preserved* in Moscow.

In 1923-4 Eisenstein, together with his assistant Alexandroff,
completed Potemkin, Potemkin was really merely a fragment
from* a much larger film that was to deal with the entire 1905
Revolution. It took four months, and was made in Odessa itself.
Curiously enough it was not very successful in Russia, it is said,
but from the first showing in Berlin began to exert more influence
upon the development of the cinema than any other film has done
to date. After Potemkin Eisenstein began to work on The^ General
Line, which was first called The Village, After nearly a year,
however, he was obliged to leave this unfinished in order to make
October, now called Ten Days That Shook the World, from the
narrative of the events of the 1917 Revolution by the American,
John Reed. (An edition of this book, which is invaluable to all
students of Russia, is issued by Modern Books, 26, Bedford Row,
London, price 2s.) Ten Days was to commemorate the tenth
anniversary of the Revolution, and there is a rumor abroad that
Eisenstein was so unwilling to give up his film in what he con-
sidered an incomplete state, to be ready in time, that to get it
from him he had to be threatened with Siberia. But probably
this is a joke. If it did not happen it is the sort of thing that
might happen, for — although one should not compare the cinema
with any other art — Potemkin and Ten Days remind one that the
beginnings of most arts are epic and recall by their austerity and
power of compression the Homeric phrases and the siege of Tr».;y.

After the showing of Ten Days, Eisenstein returned to his work
on The General Line, which is now completed. A copy is
expected in Berlin during the spring.

Potemkin is the one Russian film about which quite a number
of English articles have been written. Even the story is
comparatively well known.

It begins on the Black Sea, where a group of sailors refuse to
eat their meat ration, w-^hich is swarming with maggots. The
commander of the vessel orders a certain number of the crew to
be covered with a tarpaulin and shot. At the moment of firiner*

EISENSTEIN

the sailors refuse to shoot their own comrades and turn — not know-
ing what else to do to save th^selves — on the officers. In the
ensuing fight* the leader of the sailors is killed. His body is taken
ashore and hundreds of sympathizers in Odessa crowd to the steps
and take food out to the ship in boats. Women watch* with
babies ; old ladies smile and stare out to sea. Treacherously, from
behind, rows of Cossacks march slowly down the steps, firing.
The populace is shot down, forced into the water. The battleship
steams out towards the Fleet. All are prepared for death. Sud-
denly, jnslcad of shots, the Red Flag is hoisted and the crews of
the rest of the Fleet assemble along the rails to greet their
comrades.

This is the film that is considered so dangerous in London that
instant imprisonment is threatened to anyone who shows a foot
of it, even privately ! Apparently to serve meat swarming with
maggots and to shoot remorsely at women and children w'atching
a scene whose import they barely understand is, when you reason
it out, perfectly legitimate ! Because this is what such a prohibi-
tion amounts to. Yet there were people in England, conventional
and unrevolulionary, who protested before the War about
conditions in Russia. There have been plenty of Englishmen also
to protest against injustice all over the world. It is not altogether
surprising that military authorities should fight the film, for I
witnessed some scenes of the training of English volunteer recruits
at the beginning of the War that were almost as brutal as the
servin|;' of the infected meat. But the average Englishman was
too independent to stand for too much general oppression.
Therefore what surprises me is the lack of men to protest and fight
such censorship. One wonders what has happened to the young.
You would have thought that there would have been articles,
poems, even projects of flying in a copy from Moscow and project-
ing it in a cellar. One can visualize a high-spirited youth
kidnapping the censors responsible for the prohibition and forcing
them to witness the film four or five times over till they cheered
the Red Flag in order to get released. Certainly one feels Hazlitt,
or Landor, or Browning, or Swinburne, w^ould have had something
to say about it. Instead of which, in a film book published last

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

year, there is the bald statement : “ Potemkin is a Russian film,
and so, of course, cannot be shpwn in England.** Made not
ironically, to judge from what follows, but simply as a matter for
acceptance. There are plenty of grumbles in labor and communist
papery. But they don*t do anything about the censorship. And
besides that, Potemkin is too great to be forced into the limits of
party politics. Put the uncut version suddenly before a totally
conventional audience and I think they would cheer at the end.
(I do not count the American version, because much of the film
was cut out and propaganda organised to discredit the picture.)
To feed any mass of men on decayed food is to invite disaster.
The most autocratic rulers the world has known have won their
battles looking after the cooking pots of their soldiers. In this
film the struggle is really not between White and Red, but between
stupidity and common sense.

No two people have agreed as to the most beautiful moments of
Potemkin — tribute to the amazing unity of its achievement. The
march down the steps is historic (and how often it has been badly
copied since), others prefer the opening of the film, others the
triumphant unfurling of the Red Flag at the end. For myself, I
prefer the passing of the crowds through little countryside paths,
through roads and under bridges, into Odessa at dawn. Dis-
illusioned masses suddenly touched with hope. Like a rumor
that war had ceased in w^ar that made for a moment uncertainty,
darkness and hunger bearable. The sense, too, of the effect of
the sailors* action upon crowds not yet brave enough of themselves
to rebel.

Potemkin was first shown in Germany in a censored version, but
about eighteen months ago the complete Russian version was
authorized and has been shown continuously there ever since. An
attempt was made secretly to stop German soldiers in some places
from seeing the film, but it failed. It was shown in Austria and
through most of Switzerland. Many private showings were given
in France, A mutilated version was sent to America. Altogether,
it has been screened in thirty-six countries of the world. A cut
version was projected before the L.C.C. They refused permission
for it to be shown and would give no reasons for their action.

Kiscnstein (/f/'/i taking a clo^f-up ior The (rettoul Lire The cameraman Ik "I’lsso. as in Ter Duv^

EISENSTEIN

(What a wonderful film might be made of this incident.) A Film
Renter showed it to his stafiF, onl]f to be rung up by Scotland Yard
before the film was off the projecter, with threats as to what would
happen if he dared project it again. Yet if Potemkin had the
potency with which they credit it, it would surely have caused a
revolution in Germany and Austria, where there is much poverty
and hardship. But these nations have passed the test of seeing
it freely without anything untoward happening. It Potemkin
could start a war against the censorship it would be wonderful.
But I a!n awfully afraid that if it were shown freely in London,
when the lights snapped on in the cinema, people would just start
wondering if they would catch their bus, and was it raining, and
weren’t those Russian faces odd, and wasn’t it queer the way those
women got hysterical on the steps about something that didn’t
concern them, and they would go to bed quite smugly thinking
that the British Empire just couldn’t offer rations like that to the
Navy (forgetting the Mutiny of the Nore), but it was the sort of
thing you would expect to happen on those foreign ships. “ An
army marches on its stomach.” Personally, as long as there is
an army, I should use Potemkin as an educational and propaganda
film at Sandhurst and at Woolwich.

Kisenstein’s third film. Ten Days That Shook the World (first
called October)^ was prepared for the tenth anniversary of the
Revolution. It was shown in Berlin early in 1928. I prefer it to
Potemkin, though this is not the general opinion of the critics.

I^t. f^etersburg, 1917. The Provisional Government is perched
upon conflicting intrigues and emotions. Huge statues w^atch wide
streets. They are guarded in turn by a gigantic figure of the
Tsar. These architectural shots have the cruelty and impressive-
ness and power of old temple walls in the East. Walls made by
human labor in the sun ; and these statues flung in contrast to
them, like icebergs on a sea. A cold, great city with an Eastern
mind, set north. One is reminded suddenly of Constantinople.

The giant statue of the Tsar looks across streets.

The head falls almost in slow motion ; an arm follows, and
another arm. The throne topples forward.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Women wait for bread in the streets. The children are too
weak from hunger to cry.

Kerensky enters the Winter Palace. A line of officials salute
him. They are rather old, a little worried. As he shakes hands
they imile : “ What a democrat,” meaning “ What a king.”

He goes slowly up the staircase. This is a great moment.
The officials relax ; the atmosphere of the Palace will not be unduly
disturbed. Kerensky pauses at the door of the throne room, for
this is the symbol of the ruler ; with sudden decision he turns the
handle and walks in.

Bread gets scarcer and prices go higher. And war continues.

A railway station at the frontier.

There are crowds and banners; expectant rhythm of expectant
faces. Something is about to happen. But until it happens there
are so many reasons that might prevent it; particularly when it
means hope, and bread, and freedom.

The crowd is stiff and still ; it is like some ancient photograph
of a news event years ago.

Then it breaks suddenly, as if it itself had become lightning, and
somewhere a leg emerges but is lost, for faces and hands and
bodies crush over the screen and sway back again — Lenin has come
back to Russia.

Hungry and dissatisfied, a demonstration marches over the
bridge from the workers’ section of the town towards the Govern-
ment offices. A red flag is borne at their head in an old broken
cab drawn by a decrepit white horse.

Bread. Land. Peace.

A Government official telephones the order for the bridge to be
lifted. Shots ring out. Machine guns scatter the crowds. The
giant mechanism of the bridge begins to revolve and move. Little
frightened figures race toward firm ground. A dead woman lies
across the join of the two sections; her hair drops an inch, and
as the sections slowly part, another inch. The cab tilts backwards,
but the shot white horse dangles by a strap, high over the Neva.
Two halves of road are high in air and the starved horse is a
symbol over all Petersburg till, suddenly, the leather snaps.

EISENSTEIN

Matrons with parasols watch the crowds break. Fat, comfort-
able women, .young girls and officers flirting behind statues, look
on and laugh.

Bread. Land. Peace.

As the demonstration scatters, old ladies dig their parasols into
starving faces trying to save flags and leaflets. Papers are
scattered over the Neva. A disarmed mutinous regiment is
marched to prison, under the jeers of the crowd.

The statue of the Tsar springs, piece by piece, into position
again. •

Kerensky f^tes his victory. Women become hysterical when he
speaks. In his room, alone, he fits glass flagons together, his
fingers play with a secret spring in the table. He takes out the
crown. Slips it back. Turning, he sees a statue of Napoleon and
instinctively, as he goes up the stairs, assumes its pose.

Kornilof and his Cossacks march towards St. Petersburg.

A Red Guard and a Worker go out toward the Cossacks. They
change the points to stop the train. And hide. The vans full of
Cossacks come to a standstill. Wild, rough faces peer into the
darkness. They feel for rifles. The two men advance cautiously :
** What are you fighting for?” They talk. They pass round
leaflets. And the Cossacks wonder and whisper. Who exactly
is it that they are fighting ? Suddenly they break into laughter and
jokes. They also want bread and peace. (The effect here of change
from suspicion to good-temper is marvellously achieved. Flashes of
h^ds^ive the entirely psychological effects of argument and the
abrupt acceptance of a new idea by a mass : first only war could
please them, then as suddenly they change. For they are ignorant,
raw material, very different from the workers and the Red Guard.)
And the night ends in laughter and wild dances on the deserted
muddy fields beside the railway.

A great meeting hall. A man enters with his face tied in a
cloth, as with toothache, and with his collar turned up. He sits
very silently, but one or two members of the opposition stare and
whisper and query. ” The gentlemen seem to have recognised
me.” He has come then, Lenin. Workers, soldiers, officials,
cripples, crowd into the benches. There are still many against

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

the Revolution, and more hesitate. “ There must be no force/’
men say, and “ Kornilof nears St. Petersburg.” Reporters come
in and take their places at a table. “You cannot keep power if
you take it.” Shout and counter-shout. Expressions change on
faces^ “ We must be calm.” Men argue. Compromise. But
a young soldier leaps up to shout the Twelfth Army is with the
Bolsheviki. In a rush of votes and shouting and stamping the
active work of the Revolution begins.

It is quite impossible to describe the rhythm of this scene and
the way in which it sways from confidence to expectancy, from
compromise and fear, to the final triumphant rush of the workers
to seek arms and free the soldiers and political prisoners.

And the opposition?

An empty chair stands at the end of a long table.

There is a motor car at the palace gate. Kerensky, angry and
irritable, turns to the waiting officials : “ Gentlemen, I go to rally
our soldiers to protect the constitution.” He sees from their faces
they do not believe him, and jumps angrily into the car.

They dash along surprised, deserted streets.

Men arm ; typewriters click.

A long table is set, in the Winter Palace, with difiPerent varieties
of beautifully carved glass. Elaborate chandeliers swing over-
head. (These shots, all that are used to suggest the luxury and
state of the court, are shattering in their restraint. Contrast them
and their effect with scenes shown usually in films to spgg^st
ceremony and waste.) Kerensky’s women soldiers help to con-
struct hurried barricades. At nightfall they scatter to different
rooms, throw off rough coats to reveal ribbons and underwear and
powder. This is hysteria; not the quiet determination of the
convinced woman fighter. ,

There is no lifting of the bridge this time. Sailors take
possession of it and guard the machinery. The mayor of St.
Petersburg, a delegation of old men behind him, is turned back by
a sailor.

Men climb up to the top of the Winter Palace and enter by
seldom used stairways.

EISENSTEIN

Lorries full of the Red Guard jolt in the darkness towards the
Palace. Th^ vast courtyard is deserted. Two men g-o forward
warily, bearing a white flag. They look, they move swiftly from
arch to pillar, but there are no soldiers. There is only a woman in
uniform at the barricades, arm in sling, and looking exactly like
the matron of a war time Red Cross depot. They hand over a
paper ; the defenders of the Palace are offered twenty minutes to
surrender.

The Red Guard waits impatiently. The two men with the white
flag sit^shivering on the steps. Inside the Palace there is chaos.
One or two of the women wonder ... a number fling down their
rifles and slip away. Others w?ait grimly at the barricades with
bayonets.

Midnight. The gun of the Aurora gives the signal.

There is a rush forward, over the barricades, into the halls of
the Palace, up the stairs. The ministers of the Provisional
Government are sitting in the council room. Before they can
realise what has happened they are arrested, shoved aside, and
members of the Bolshevik Government take their places. There is
no time to lose if the Revolution is to be successful.

Some of the townspeople, hungry and cold, begin to pillage
the cellars, but the Red Guard soon restores order. Everyone is
searched as they go out, and when the people are tempted by the
bottles of wine, men drive bayonets through the casks.

Shots shift from rushing feet up long staircases to crow'^ds moving
tlyough streets and soldiers on guard along the Palace walls. The
movement gets swifter ; shot is cut into shot. Until light creeps
across the sky on laughing faces and a new city.

But how describe this film? It is all rhythm, all movement.
I have seen T en Days three times, twice by courtesy of Prometheus
and opce in a tiny Berlin kino, I have seen it without music at
nine o'clock in the morning; the more austere the circumstance
the greater its effect. And of all the films I know, I feel it to be
the greatest. In fact, had I the desire and opportunity to make a
film myself, I should ask as preparation for it to be run through a
score of times, because I seemed to learn from it more of what
cinematography really was, than from any other picture or theory.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Perhaps it is because its entire appeal is to the intellect — not to
the emotions solely, but to the fcrain, which is beyond emotion —
the super or over-conscious, that is habitually so starved. There
is not a shot in the picture that has not been created by mind alone.
It is. interesting to note that Eisenstein was once interested in
Leonardo da Vinci, for the two have this in common, a desire for
universal knowledge. It is possible to record an event emotionally,
as Stabavoi has done in Two Days, or Pudovkin in Storm Over
Asia, and the result can be very great. It is much more difficult
to base the appeal upon a knowledge of each incident and its inter-
relation with history, science and mechanics, and yet to achieve
as emotional an effect, through penetrating below emotion to the
truth beneath. For instance, in comparing the treatment of
Kerensky in this film and in The End of St, Petersburg, his actual
flight in Pudovkin ’s film, though more personal, cannot achieve
the power of the single empty chair, which throws back at the
receptive spectator whole cycles of history.

Eisenstein has said that October (the Russian title of Ten Days)^
while on the one hand it continues the tradition of Potemkin in
having no actor and no individual heroes, is, on the other, an
experiment towards a completely new form of kino for the future —
“ intellectual cinematography.’’ The intellectual cinema, follow-
ing the line of the “ risen lions ” of Potemkin, of Kerensky mount-
ing the staircase of the Winter Palace, and the gods in Ten Days,
must lead the way to completely new forms, at the same time
composing a synthesis of all the various forms of cinematography
already existing : the emotional and pathetic picture, the docu-
mentary chronicle and the absolute film.

In both Potemkin and Ten Days, Eisenstein was assisted by
Alexandroff. Grigori Vasilievitch Alexandroff was born in 1903 at
Ekaterinburg (now Sverdlovsk). While still studying ut the
gymnasium there he entered the service of the municipal theatre
when he was nine years old, acting as errand boy to the assistant
manager.

He worked at the theatre for five years, from 1912 to the October
Revolution of 1917, as assistant to the furnisher, the costumier,
the hairdresser, the decorator and the electro-technician. In the

EISENSTEIN

summer, when the theatre was closed, he worked at the cinema-
theatre, w^here he assisted the ryechanician.

In 1918 he entered the short courses in stage-management at
the Workers’ and Peasants* Theatre. After completing the
courses he worked in the theatrical department in the capacity of
instructor and censor of kino pictures (this was the beginning’of his
attraction towards cinematography), and to this period belongs
his work at the front (organisation of military clubs, etc,).

In 1921 he began to work in the “ Mexican ** Studio of the
Moscow Prolet-Kult. His first appearance on the Moscow stage
was in the role of a newspaper-seller in the “ Mexican ” film
directed by S. M. Eisenstein and V. S. Smishliaeva. He played
various types during this period under different managers, including
womens* and old mens* parts.

In S. M. Eisenstein’s film, It is a Good Horse That Never
Stumbles, at the Prolet-Kult theatre, he w^orked as assistant and
played the part of Goloutvin (the man in the mask). He also
performed acrobatic and circus feats on the trapeze and tight-rope.

He worked jointly with Eisenstein in all his productions, and
took part in working out the plans of construction. Together
w^ith Eisenstein, he began to reflect on cinema work.

In 1924, as assistant to Eisenstein, he began to work with him
and with V. Pletnief on the scenario and plans for The Strike. In
1925 he worked as assistant director on Potemkin, in which he also
appeared as the officer Giliarovsky.

In J1926 Eisenstein and he composed the scenario for The General
Line. In 1927 he helped to compose the scenario and direct Ten
Days.

He was working up to the present time, in the capacity of
assistant manager to Eisenstein, on The General Line, and is also
actii^ as teacher in the stage management class at the G.T.K.
(Staf\ Technical School for Cinematography). He is working also
in a n\mber of social organisations, where he occupies responsible
positions.

Eisciptein’s cameraman for all films is E. Tisse.

Whein Ten Days was finished Eisenstein went back to The
General Line. This film has now been completed, but no copy

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

had come to Berlin when I was last there. 1 saw, however, a
collection of about one hundred sjills, and the subject of the picture
is as interesting as those of his other films. For it is the attempt
to show how Russia can improve its food supplies and revolutionise
village life by the introduction of motor tractors and modern
agricultural machinery.

I know very little about farming, but the attitude of many people
that all would be well if boys and girls stuck to the land instead
of crowding into cities always has annoyed me. I have lived for
a short while in a village, and as a rule the standards ofo^ife and
education are so far below those in towns that one can only respect
those who try to get out of such an environment. The land is all
very well if you are w'alking over it, or planting flower seeds, or
growing a vegetable patch. It is certainly more amusing to pluck
wild daffodils than to buy flowers in a flower shop. But it is not
amusing to w^atch Greek peasants crouched over uneven ground
gathering olives into baskets for sometimes twelve hours at a
stretch because they have no modern machinery. (It is estimated,
for instance, that a fourth of the entire olive crop is lost in the
south because they have not the means to install up-to-date
appliances.) And it is the same thing that happens on a greater
scale in Russia.

Again, I have never understood the objection to machinery made
by presumably educated people. And their clamor for things
“ hand-made ” or “ hand-worked.” I read a few months ago
an appalling story in a report on the Rural Industries of England,
of a man w^ho worked eleven and twelve hours a day making
baskets by hand at the uncertain wage of thirty-five shillings a
week. It was further stated that his hands became unrecognisable
at the end of a week’s work through constant immersion in w^ater
alternating with forcing rough twigs into basket shape. And still
people talk about hand labor and keeping old industries alive/i As
long as people in villages have to rise before dawn and gq to bed
near midnight in a constant endeavour to sow, weed, destroy
insects, reap and harvest before storm and snow and r^n cheat
them of food, with much of this work toil of the most arduous and
soul destroying nature, so long will life in villages mean gossip,

EISENSTEIN

interference, cruelty and ignorance ; exactly, in fact, as
Priobrashenskaya has shown it ii»Thc Peasant Women of Riazan.
But mercifully, and this is progress and civilization, life in villages
need not mean these things if modern machinery and methods can
be installed. Only in Russia there is not solely the struggle* first
to provide the money for the machinery, but they have so few
trained men able to demonstrate the working of the machines or
able to do minor repairs. Their population is not familiar with
machinery, as the peoples are of Western Europe. As far as one
is able no judge from a superficial examination, the average
American child is more mechanically inclined than the correspond-
ing European boy or girl, because they have more frequent oppor-
tunities at an earlier age of examining machinery. But there are
whole sections of Siberia where the peasants are barely familiar
with the railway. To introduce modern methods in Russia means
a continuous fight against superstition, habit and definite
antagonism, together with the problem of having so few men
equipped to go out as instructors.

Faced with this problem they remembered that powerful weapon
to fight ignorance, the cinema. And it is safe to say that wherever
The General lAne is shown, agriculture and motor tractors -will be
subjects on everybodys' lips, and occupying every mind.

A Russian to w^hom I had applied for permission to see Pudov-
kin’s Mechanics of the Brain, said to me: “ Russia has little money,
but we are sending educational films into the poorest villages. If
th$y Cilnnot afford to pay from sixpence to threepence, which is
the usual price charged to see these films, we show" them in the
villages for nothing, to educate them. England is a rich country.
What are you doing?” And (remembering that I had just read
in Th^ Times Educational Supplement that there were still over
five hu'adred schools on the Black List and one hundred and sixty
thousand scholars) I had to reply, “ Very little.”

This ii not quite correct, of course, for there are numbers of
people inlEngland working hard on various educational problems.
And the^eneral average education of the nation is far higher than
that ojAhe Russian peasant, whose opportunity for learning has

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

only just begun* But English educational authorities, as a whole,
have done nothing to adapt themselves to modern developments,
and we squander magnificent material yearly as a result. And
when one considers that Russia, after ten years of war, revolution,
famine, disease and death, has the vitality to make a film such as
The General Line, in an attempt to educate and improve the
condition of a vast agricultural population, one wonders that the
most conventionally-minded Englishman does not accept this side
of Russia’s work, whatever may be his feelings about the rest of
the country. (j

The stills are very lovely. Picked up at random, they might be
reproductions from some museum or gallery except that pictures,
however beautiful, seldom have that quality of life. Particularly
remarkable are some old peasants* heads, nor is the grim, un-
pleasing side of village life absent, for there was one picture of a
rather fat woman that has all the meanness and cruelty of some
village autocrat, bullying the boys and girls in innumerable little
ways, secure from interference. And there seems to be at least
one humorous episode, where the tractor apparently refuses to
work or is worked the wrong way. The corn and flowers covering
the fields emphasise the richness of the landscape.

^ Eisenstein, it is said, will shortly go to Hollywood. With a
director less sure of his method, one might be afraid. For very
few directors or actors have survived the Californian studios. But
one does not fear with Eisenstein. His work is too integral a
part of him to sufiFer from American influence. His film,s thf.re,
if he makes any, may be failures. Because he may be forced by
the authorities to compromise, or they may even snatch the film
from his hands and give it to someone else to cut. They can do
that while he is in Hollywood, but directly he leaves one feels he
will shake off their influence like water. On the other ha^.d it is
possible that, as there has been such a complete collapse ’A Holly-
wood the past year, and as the power of the bigger comjjanies is
gradually weakening, Eisenstein might be given a fref^ hand, in
which case there might be interesting developments. TMink of the
science of Hollywood rightly used. And the film thaOhe might
make of the differing elements of many-peopled American-

(rtntf<'>y of \ *iru . s

J I'utloxkin .1'. work lultiti}' his film

EISENSTEIN

At the present time in Russia, in addition to film construction,
Eisenstein is working upon the theoretical problems of the Soviet
kino and is lecturing in the stage-management section of the State
Technical School of Cinematography. He is also head of the
Kino section of the psycho-physical laboratories for the study of
the audience.

CHAPTER IV.

PUDOVKIN.

▼

Vsevolod Pudovkin was born in Moscow and educated at the
lycee there. He afterwards entered the University and studied
chemistry ; this was no doubt of great value in his later cinemato-
graphic work. He volunteered upon the outbreak of War in 1914
(possibly this accounts for the perfect moment in The End of St.
Petersburg, when war hysteria is shown at its true value), and after
fighting in the trenches w'as taken prisoner. During a long
captivity in Germany he studied several foreign languages and
made some Illustrations for books.

After the Armistice he returned to Russia and studied as an actor
at Kuleshof’s school. He helped in some of the first experiments
when they had still no equipment and no raw stock. He then
acted in three films and went on to the organisation of the Russ,
which shortly afterwards developed into the Meschrabpom-Russ.
He is as noted for his acting in Russia as he is for his directing,
and his films are very popular throughout the country. • ,

The first film he directed was a short two-reel one called The
Chess Player. This has never been shown outside Russia. This
was followed by an educational film, made in collaboration with
Professor Pavlov, called Mechanics of the Brain. He then made
Mother and The End of St. Petersburg. His fifth film. Storm
Over Asia, has been shown in Russia and Germany, lyis said
that he is now going to work on Germinal, from the story »y Emile
Zola. He recently finished acting the chief part in Tlje Living
Corpse, from the story by Tolstoy. (

Of his films, only Mother and The End of St. Peters^g have
been shown in England, at single Sunday afternoon perforiiances

PUDOVKIN

of the Film Society. The End of St. Petersburg has been shown
also with great success, but in a «ut version, in New York.

Had Pudovkin been born earlier, before the discovery of the
cinema, he would assuredly have had a hard struggle to decide
whether he would have become a doctor or, as I have said before,
a painter. Perhaps science would eventually have claimed him :
in addition to the cinematic quality of the scenes, no scientist bent
upon reporting minutely a series of facts for sheerly educational
purposes could better the recording of the Mongolian dances from
an ethnoj-raphical point of view, or the operation from the medical,
in Storm Over Asia. And, of course, the entire film of Mechanics
of the Brain is recorded with the precision of pure science.

Perhaps none of the Russian directors have so used their own
life and experience as Pudovkin has. I do not mean by this that
he has used any incidents from it in his films, only that they are
the result of introspection and the sharp stinging of his own
experience. Only a volunteer who had been through the successive
phases of war hysteria and destruction could have recorded, one
feels, those marvellous war sequences in The End of St. Peters^
burg. And perhaps imprisonment tends to develop concentration
of the visual sense, for it is interesting to note in this connection
that the greatest of the German directors, G. W. Pabst, also spent
several years in France as a prisoner of war.

Pudovkin’s second film, Mechanics of the Brain, was made in
collaboration with Professor Pavlof, upon Pavlof’s experiments
on* the .rf::onditioned reflexes. It has been shown widely in Russia
as part of an educational programme to familiarise the people with
modern scientific developments, and a version of it was shown
by the Film Arts Guild of New York last year. It has not been
shown in public in Europe, partly on account of the expense of
translJiting the sub-titles, but Mr. Montagu has now a copy in
London. I was shown it by courtesy of the Russian Handelsver-
tretung in Berlin, wuth Russian sub-titles only.

Pavlof’s work on the brain has been familiar to European doctors
and scientists for the past quarter of a century ; he contends that
his experiments, upon the ease or difficulty of establishing a
conditioned reflex should be of extreme value in the education of

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

children. And while he may seem to ignore some of the new
developments in the study of ithe mind, his attempts to relate
physiology and brain process are undoubtedly of great value.

The film begins with scenes in a zoo, with children feeding
animals, and afterwards children swimming. The next reel shows
the well-known experiments upon dogs. Food in a dog*s mouth
is naturally productive of saliva; an unconditioned reflex. From
long-continued association the mere sight of food will produce of
itself saliva, and therefore a conditioned reflex.

On paper this sounds complicated. Everything is clearj watched
on the screen. An artificial opening is made “ in the salivary
duct from the paratid gland ”, and a glass balloon is fixed to the
opening and connected by tubes with a recording instrument in
another room. The dog is shown eating and the balloon fills with
saliva. Further shots show it filling when the dog is merely shown
food and before the food reaches the mouth. Another experiment
showed a metronome being started and just after a hundred beats
the dog was always fed. After this has been repeated a number
of times the dog began to secrete saliva at the start of the
metronome. But if a metronome of fifty beats is started and no
food is given and this also is repeated a number of times, the dog
produces less and less saliva at each repetition and a negative
conditioned stimulus has arisen.

Other experiments were shown with monkeys. A bell rings, or
at a certain metronome beat, a blue plate full of food is pushed
within the monkey’s reach. As soon as the monkey hdkrs the
accustomed sound it climbs down hurriedly towards the expected
morsel. But if another sequence of beats or a red plate be used
the monkey remains on his perch, totally uninterested. Other
experiments on frogs followed, and towards the end of the fijm we
saw how a conditioned reflex might be formed in a child.

The child lay happily and easily on a table, unable to see the
operator concealed in another room. A funnel was suspended
above his mouth. There was a band round his arm. The experi-
menter pressed a bulb which caused a slight friction against the
skin of the arm, and at the same moment a sweet dropped into

PUDOVKIN

the child’s mouth. This was repeated several times, to the child’s
obvious satisfaction. Finally the ^xperimentor pressed the bulb
that caused friction, but no sweet dropped, though the child’s
eyes were fixed on the funnel. After this had been repeated a few
times the child did not attempt to respond to the signal, but stared
around the room, for even at so early an age it uses its mind and
an automatic reflex is far less easily accomplished. It is said that
children develop reflexes more easily than animals and retain them
longer without practice, but they are also liable to be destroyed
more quidkly.

Pictures of idiots followed, and of a man in an advanced stage
of syphilis, etc. Some of these were shown eating and contrasted
with animals being fed. It is said that the idiot’s brain was no
more developed than that of a fish, and certainly the resemblance
between some of these types and the less intelligent animals was
remarkable, in the way both snatched at and spilled their food.

Pavlov claims that these experiments are doing much to discover
the nature of sleep and neurasthenia, and that he is able to produce
both in his dogs by giving them too difficult problems to solve.
He has stated also that there will be no absolute freedom of the
will, in his opinion, until the physiology of the brain be understood.

The greatest part of the film, however, is the final section, where
close-ups of a woman’s face are shown during child-birth. These
shots were more full of pain and terror and helplessness than any-
thing ever written, and perhaps (because it was an actual record
of an acj^ual event) than anything Pudovkin has done in films since.
The end of Mother, where the woman is cut down by the trampling
horsemen, is but a sketch in comparison. It is, of course, not
generally realised that (probably because of sexual taboos and
inhibitions) progress in painless child-birth has been neglected and
research in these matters has not kept pace with modern medical
development. It is said, for instance, that the subject being one
in which major academic distinction can no longer be gained in
the American medical colleges, only those men just able to scrape
through the course are taking obstetrics, with the result that the
death rate of women in child-birth in the United States is one of
the highest in the world and is steadily mounting. Medical

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

students have told me that there is a great unwillingness to use
to their full extent those methodf of preventing pain already known,
as it means that the doctors must wait too many hours with each
woman. In this connection it is wwth while to quote Dr. Ernest
Jones in Psycho-Analysis, Benn’s Sixpenny Library, No. 153. He
says on page 52 : “ The scant respect paid to psychology in medical
education is, perhaps, not altogether unconnected with the way in
which sexual problems are shirked there. Among the laity the
impression prevails that doctors have occult knowledge of such
matters, and sexual problems are often euphemistically referred to
as ‘ medical questions ’. They are astounded when they learn that
such matters form no part whatever of medical education, that they
are avoided in medical schools with the same meticulous care as in
girls’ schools, and that the practitioner is launched into the world
as uninformed of them as any layman.” And, curiously enough,
the greatest opposition to research into painless child-birth comes
from the women doctors (with a few notable exceptions) them-
selves. The idea that sexual intercourse for all women is a sin
and must be paid for by intense suffering at the birth of every
child holds as good now, in the minds of many doctors, as it did
in the Middle Ages. Let us hope that Russia, with these films
and with these efforts to educate along constructive lines, will
produce also scientists able to investigate this subject.

After the woman in child-birth, a baby is shown, and an
interesting series of pictures follow showing the development to be
expected of a child at different ages from three months to si^ yea^s.
His advance in the manner of washing himself is shown from the
fat, one-year-old struggling with a toothbrush to the boy of six
playing with a mechanical toy. As the average adult has seldom
any idea of what may be expected from a child of different ages,
this part of the film seemed most constructive and helpful. *

The picture ended with a group of children desiring a toy on a
high shelf. One fetched a chair, another stood on it and finally
reached it down ; the beginning of the reasoning power of the
brain.

It is very difficult to give in words the effect of this film. Things
that seemed so clear in the pictures seem diffuse and confused put

PUDOVKIN

into sentences. Its value for students is immense, and yet it is so
simple that anyone (having the syb-titles in their own language)
could follow it.

Seeing the importance of the brain, it seems strange that such
a film should have to wait so many years before being shown in
England. And it is to be hoped that when it is finally screened
it will be in an intact form, and not with the child-birth and other
scenes cut out in deference to our alleged English susceptibility.

Mechanics of the Brain is an investigation into the processes of
the mind* as cold, as full of possibility and check, as a page from
da Vinci’s notebook.

Pudovkin’s third film, Mother, is based upon a story by Maxim
Gorki. It is said that the original scenario was submitted to
Pabst, who refused it because he saw its possibilities and felt that
such a film could be made only in Russia, unhampered by conven-
tional or censorial considerations.

It is perhaps the great religious film of the world, I have seen
it three times, and each time discovered some new depth of truth
in it. It is like some lovely and electric Greek statue shining across
the barbarous mists of the world.

How often the root of evil is a pre-conceived idea. It were
easier, it seems, to look across the wastes of all Mongolia for a
dinosaur egg than to discover impartial judgment in mankind.
Mother is a Russian film, and therefore must incite to revolution
and therefore must not be shown, there being apparently such
“ jnsLgm ” in the word Russia, to the official mind, that all England
on seeing the film would break windows, make a bonfire of doors
and dash to the Home Office in the best Hollywood-revolution
manner, just because the film is a Sovkino production instead of
being under the lion trade mark of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

It is too ridiculous, too absurd. Would anyone throw away
a lifetime of thought and training and rush down a street waving
an iron club because he happened to see a different point of view
from his own flashed on a screen for an hour? If it could happen
we might live in a better, happier world, because we might learn
then from watching tolerance and wisdom. We might even smash

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

all censorship. But people do not learn from what they see or
apprehend momentarily. A riivolution (to repeat^ is always a
process of slow gfrowth, never the flaringf of a minute.

But, worse still, Mother is not red. It is not even particularly
Russian. It is universal, which (they may say) is worse. For it
deals with truth. But it was made by Russians in Russia and
therefore may not be shown in England, except semi-privately,
although anyone can watch it in Germany and Switzerland for a
shilling and has suffered no harm, seemingly, in the process !

It is the story that has gone on in every savage tribe and in
every civilization ; the eternal story of human wisdom and beauty
broken by tribal conventions and stupidity. It is the psychological
tragedy of the world.

It is also the history, on a greater scale, of people and their
attitude to this film. Some say, ** We hear it is beautiful, we want
to see it.’* Far more say, without a thought, “ Oh, that dreadful
Russian picture. Such things ought to be forbidden.” And this
particular conflict is also a portrait of that of the present time ;
the struggle between evolution into a greater civilization or the
plunge back (more imminent when advance is possible than in a
more stagnant period) into the darker ages of the world.

A drunk father, a son, a mother cleaning up the kitchen. You
might find the same situation in a Sudanese hut, a New York
tenement or a London slum. People may argue, but the father
should not get drunk. But if lives become unbearably monotonous
something is going to break somewhere. That is where ec^Jcatv^n,
up to the present, has failed. It offers repression instead of indi-
vidual development. For the attitude of education and religion
throughout centuries has been ” pleasure is a sin ” and ” nothing
that is not disagreeable of accomplishment is work.” Therefore
we have the kitchen in Mother, with the woman washing the clothes
and the man getting drunk.

It is true that many leaders of education and religion have held
an entirely opposite view. But their principles are entirely dis-
regarded by their followers. Look at England. Boys are sent to
school for ten years or longer at a cost to their parents of from
fifty to three hundred pounds a year. They emerge at sixteen

> icnoiis :iir (^1 (Mnuv.il Russia Roes *0 wai .

T-'rom Thi' Fvd of St }*(‘ttrsbin^'

PUDOVKIN

unable to read a book intelligently, ignorant of the names of the
most common plants or animals, -knowing nothing of g'-‘Ography,
modern history, the most elementary economic principles, or of
how to form an independent judgment. And with a profound
contempt (deliberately taught them) for all boys outside their, own
narrow circle, whether this circle be that of the Public, secondary or
elementary school. They are not only untrained for work, but
they are utterly dependent on others for their amusements and in
the same mental state as the father when he slouches into the
village rnn for a drink. Their attitude to their wives resembles
his, A little sentimentality, some cruelty, the evasion of definite
issues. In spite of the proved efficacy of vocational tests they
are seldom given or the result disregarded. Yet half the trouble
in the world to-day is caused by people being forced to work hours
a day at jobs for which they are unfitted. It would be so easy to
teach the use of modern appliances and the results of modern
knowledge in school, but it would make life pleasanter and would
involve new issues. Therefore nothing is done. Exactly as in
Mother.

But the son (played by N. Batalof) is dissatisfied. He cannot
accept his father’s solution. He has attended meetings, it is in
1905, and in the middle of the night he hides arms for the strikers,
under a board in the floor.

It happens to be arms. It might equally well (as far as the
spirit is concerned) be a book, or a friend, or a desire to study
some other trade ; it is, at any rate, something of which his family
does not approve, and his mother (V. Baranovskaya) watches him,
feigning sleep.

A few drift over a hill to a meeting. Wind blows through grass.
There may come a time when people will not be stupid.

The strike fails. The father, ranged against the strikers, is
shot. The son is chased (and there is all the terror of pursuit in
this sequence), but escapes. Coming back to his home, where his
mother sits by his father’s corpse, he is arrested.

But they can find nothing incriminating in his possession and
let him go. Only for a few minutes. Another officer comes in.
And his mother intercedes. He may go free, the officer says, if

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

he will tell them where the arms are hidden. Naturally he is silent.
But the Another remembers where she has seen hipi hide them.
She lifts the board in the kitchen innocently, desiring only to save
her son. As parents all over the world might condemn their
children. It is better, they say, for X to be a doctor, though he
hates it, than to look after sick animals which he loves, because a
doctor can achieve a better position than a veterinary surgeon ;
it is nicer for Y to marry, though she may have no aptitude for
housework, than for her to work in a shop and become independent.
The mother believes the conventional w'orld. (It is intei^sting to
compare this scene with the father in Two Days; both deal with
the same problem.) But the officer, instead of freeing the son,
strikes him brutally in the face, and soldiers drag him away to
prison.

The trial comes. One of the judges draws horses, all are bored.
The defending lawyer hiccups; he is very nervous. And there is
nothing to be said for a prisoner who has defied authority in such
a manner. It would not be safe for the lawyer to be brilliant.
The judges glance over the papers, up at the clock. Among the
few people seated in the body of the court is a middle-aged woman,
the personification of conventional morality. She puts up her
eyeglass and her lips curl with the sadistic pleasure of seeing
a human being legitimately — to her mind — tortured. The mother
watches. The judge reads out the sentence. “ Prison.” And
from the back of the court the mother shouts, in a world-wrecking
plunge to essentials, “ what is truth?” ^ ^

Spring comes. The ice breaks. Great floes float downstream.
The branches are thick with buds. The mother now is hiding
pamphlets and working. But the son is in a small cell, very dark,
with bars across the window.

Spring. •'

The men in the prison have nothing to do but think. They
smell the stir of leaves outside. They remember ploughing and
working. But there is nothing about them but walls ; stone and
dirt and silence.

The mother walks along the village path. Ducks waddle and
children play in the mud. The snows have melted. The trees are

PUDOVKIN

coming out. Long buds shoot into the air. The mother stops
to watch anqther woman feed h«r child. I

The boy, in prison clothes too big for him, shuffles to me barrier
to see his mother. She, now, has become a revolutionary. While
she endeavours to slip a piece of paper into the son's hand^ the
guard watches a beetle trying to crawl out of a saucer of food.
As the insect succeeds, the soldier squashes it, his mouth curling
in a moron’s grin. But the son has the paper in his fingers,
and when he gets back to his cell reads on it that they will try to
free him*.

The next day, at exercise time, the boy is staring out from the
tiny loophole in his cell at the sky. For punishment, the guard
says, he shall not have his exercise in the yard — and it is the day
they will attempt to free him.

Crowds march through the town.

The prisoners, marching round and round in the yard, turn.
The few guards are quickly knocked down or killed, but the soldiers
are arming in the city and from the walls of the prison, guards
shoot at the escaping men.

The boy beats on the door till a guard comes. Somehow he
knocks him down, escapes, others escape, they join the rush in the
yard, but each time as they approach the wall, bullets thin their
number. A few get away, including the boy. They race for the
river edge. Bullets follow them.

Men run down lanes.

, Bodices lie in the courtyard.

The cavalry ride out.

The son leaps on to a piece of ice. If he dies now he will at
least have known liberty again for a moment. The river rushes
past and he scrambles from ice crack to ice heap ; out of the range
of bhilets.

The crowd marches back disconsolately : they have failed. The
mother’s face is inscrutable : she thinks of vengeance. At the
bridge edge a figure crawls up the bank and runs towards them.
He is lost in the throng ; his mother pushes and is pushed forward.
As they meet cavalry thunder across the bridge and rifle bullets
mow down the people.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Figures scatter. The boy falls, dead this time. But he and his
mother hive met and he has di«d on earth, under tl^e free sky.

As she IS cut down by a sabre her face fills the screen, screaming.
But the Red Flag waves and will wave — and there is triumph in
the ending rather than despair.

For an idea may be stronger than force, and may itself become
force.

Mother was shown in London by the Film Society for one per-
formance at the end of 1928. Curiously enough, the more
conservative members of the audience (according to conf^entional
rating) were the most enthusiastic. The so-called labor groups
were, to a great extent, afraid of it. They thought it inflammatory
and too strong, while the conservatives were saying magnificent
and why is it not shown throughout England. But it is doubtful
whether any spiritual revolution in England will come from the
present labor groups. For these, at the moment, do not seem
to be really interested in helping humanity. They have, most of
them, an inferiority complex which is soothed by the hope of
political power. Were they given that power it is questionable if
they would attack fundamental issues (witness their avoidance of
birth control), but would attempt rather to substitute themselves
for the dispossessed classes. This was brought out during the
war, for whereas there was a constructive effort made by the youth
of the upper middle classes in 1912-1914 to break the tyranny of
the public school and to discount tradition, these efforts were
arrested by the war and the rebels killed within the first few months.
But the boys who came along from families previously unfamiliar
with these conditions, did not destroy, but re-established the
tyranny of “ what is done ” on an even stronger basis. 1913
would have been more favourable to Mother than 1928.

Mr. Pabst once said : “ Russia has taken one road and America
has taken the opposite, but in a hundred years both will meet.
England will take neither, but will work out her own salvation
independently, and in the end she will arrive at the same result.’'

And this was a true and a profound statement. England trying
a French or a Russian revolution would get into an appalling
mess. The rest of Europe would enjoy themselves thoroughly

PUDOVKIN

and a good half of the country, from peasant to merchant, would
pretend nothijig had happened. Brobably a lot of peoplej^ould get
killed, but hostilities would stop at the most critical moment lest
they disturbed the pigeons at St. Paul’s or because the Lost Dogs’
Home was out of meat, and really, one could not feed them
revolutionaries, could one ! We have simply not the temperament
for that mode of adjustment. On the other hand, we are rapidly
arriving at the point when a small minority, utterly out of touch
with conditions of to-day, control what we shall read, see, say and
do. Ymj may not see Ten Days because it might incite children to
revolution. But there are over five hundred schools on the Black
List to-day where hundreds of children sit in insanitary school-
rooms. (See the weekly issue of The Times Educational Supple-
ment.) A committee on the teaching of hygiene stated that it
would be unwise to supply their booklets to many schools, as either
no running water was laid on or a single towel and piece of soap
w^as allotted for indiscriminate use by all the scholars. Perhaps
this is logical ; we teach revolution through our own neglect and
then will not allow them to see the triumphant result of protest.
And lest it be thought that the care is given entirely to the rich,
it is a well-known tact that if sanitary inspection were enforced,
few of the public schools w^ould come up to standard, and the
death rate from preventible causes is high in them. Also, at a
lecture given on the Dalton plan a couple of years ago, ninety out
of the hundred present had come from elementary schools at their
ojvn ei!j:pense, and one or two had gone without dinner to attend it,
of the remaining ten, one or two were from secondary schools, and
the rest were parents or those interested in education. Not a
single teacher from the public schools was present. Discussing
this point later with a schoolmaster, I was told that it was not
posi^ble to be interested in modern developments in education and
keep a job at any but one or two of the big schools. So with all
classes so neglected it is perhaps not surprising that the English
put up with barriers to the freedom of their intelligence that would
not be endured abroad. But the conflict between progress and
tradition grows yearly more acute and our virtues of good temper
and tolerance are suffering in the process.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

It is hard to watch the position of England decay each year.
For therAis magnificent material in the country that^is constantly
wasted or badly used. And it could occupy a definite place in the
evolution of the new world. America has produced a high standard
of lifting and education, but unfortunately her schools are run upon
traditional lines and have little relationship with life. The result
is a constant surging between complete restriction and complete
license once school is left. (Probably no law in history has caused
such havoc as prohibition.) So that America, faced with grave
decisions, is uncertain and possibly retrogressive. Riftssia has
intellectual leadership and an uneducated peasantry, a situation
that may be duplicated in the East but not in the West. And
England might become the balance between the two continents —
if it would only scrap its prehistoric educational system and think
instead of repeating platitudes.

A boy eager for progression, a family anxious for him to keep
safely in the old ways, definite opposition from authority (what
about the old motor rule that a car must be preceded by a man
bearing a red flag?), finally imprisonment and death. Forget
about Russia and remember that Mother fundamentally is the story
of many English homes, with disease or stagnation, or the Colonies
as a substitute for the ending.

Pudovkin’s third film, The End of St. Petersburg, was first
shown in Germany by Derussa, in the spring of 1928. The manu-
script was by Natan Zarchi ; S. Kolopski was the architect, and
W. Golovnia (who photographed Pudovkin's other films) ^as
charge of the camera. M. Doller was assistant director and it was
a Meschrabpom-Russ production, and very popular in Russia.

Germany received the film with unmeasured enthusiasm.
Actually I saw it twice, by courtesy of Derussa, as we arrived After
the Berlin run of the picture was over. But it was shown again
last autumn and it was possible to see it throughout Germany, at
prices ranging roughly from one and six to five shillings a seat.

It is an attempt to show not only the story of the war years from
1914 to the Revolution, as they afl'ected everyone, but also how
these events affected the development of a peasant from his

,,Das Ende von St. Petersburg

'ri»e peasant hero ot The Tnd of StP Petetslwrg, played hy J. C ’huvelet.

Hair {It-ft) him

iur

PUDOVKIN

ignorant youth in a small village to becoming an intelligent worker
in the new er^. ' ?

A man is working in the fields.

A woman goes to fetch water, her pail drops, she staggers
towards the steps, and crawls animal fashion towards the bed.
Her smallest child, frightened, trots across the rough stubble
towards the father : “ Come, quickly, mother is dying,** it cries,
not realising that yet another baby is being born. There is not
enough food. So the eldest son must seek work in the city.

He arrives (I. Chuvelef) in St. Petersburg. Together with
another worker he struggles along the platform, hair in his eyes,
looking like an Eskimo, utterly bewildered. They cross the
square, two black dots on the horizon seen between the giant legs
of statues. He arrives at last in the workmen*s quarter of the
town.

But conditions are becoming impossible in the big works
belonging to LebedefF (W. Obolensky), the rich manufacturer.
The men are over-worked and badly treated. He is preparing an
advance order of munitions for the Government and orders longer
hours to be wwked. One man (A. Chistiakoff) organises a
strike. Returning home from work he finds the peasant sitting
in his home — they are from the same village. The peasant has
been unable to find either work or a lodging.

But the workman *s wife (V. Baranovskaya) dreads a strike.
Both her small children are hungry. She is resentful, both of the
meeting of the strikers held there, and of the peasant, who is
allowed to sleep in a corner.

Next morning most of Lebedeff’s workers are out on strike.
But there are plenty of unemployed in the town. The peasant joins
the ranks of those recruited to fill the strikers* places. But there
is trouble at the gates and they are not allowed to enter by the
strike leaders.

Lebedeff and some officers drive up in cars. In utter ignorance
of what he is doing, the peasant betrays his friend. He shows the
officers where the strike leader lives and the man is arrested.
Lebedeff gives the peasant a small coin and promise of work.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

The peasant wanders through Petrograd and it dawns gradually
on his uAdeveloped intelligence what he has done. He passes food
stalls anf smells the food wistfully, but he does not spend the coin.
Meantime, the worker’s wife has been unable to get bread for her
children. Her husband is in prison. The peasant comes slowly
down the stairs into her bare room and puts the coin on the table.
She gets up angrily, they do not speak, but the peasant’s eyes are
beginning to turn from sub-normal to human. He goes out up
the stairs. She follows and throws the coin after him.

He has forgotten his cap. The woman looks at it, and picks
it up. As he crosses the yard she rushes up with it and hands it
back, without a word, not yet willing to forgive, but beginning to
understand.

Next day the peasant forces his way into Lebedeff’s office and
demands the release of his fellow-villager. It is refused. He
smashes up the office and shakes Lebedeff like a terrier before he
is over-powered, beaten and flung into prison.

19U. War.

In no other film has war hysteria been portrayed so devastatingly
and so w’^ell. Guns are hung with flowers. Girls drop flowers on
soldiers. Old men wave hats, women smile. It is a great, joyous
festival. In the prison the cell doors are opened. A little thief,
sensing his opportunity, begs to be allowed to volunteer. He, the
hero, is given the flag to carry. The peasant, blinking at the
sudden light, is forced into the ranks behind. They march out
towards war. And they and the soldiers and the volunte^xs a^id
the guns are hidden under flowers, and the tramp of their feet is
not heard for laughter and cheers.

(Just as it happened in London, in 1914.)

War pfoes on. Lebedeff is making money in munitions. Scenes
of him in the crowded Stock Exchange cross cut with men strug-
gling between barbed wire.

A body disappears in mud. Here are corpses. German or
Russian ? Only the mud can tell. Limbs rot away. Shells burst,
men drown in flooded trenches. Pudovkin himself, it will be
remembered, volunteered and fought for many months before he
\vas taken prisoner. There has never been anything comparable to

PUDOVKIN

this as a record of war. And between shots all the tini, life is
shown as it goes on, in St. Petersburg. »

Lebedeff in his car — a drowning man. J

Men lift bowler hats and bargain; shells burst near frozen,
frightened soldiers, and cold liquid mud trickles over their heavily
plastered coats.

Food grows scarcer — the men in the dug-outs wonder “ what
are we fighting for?”

It is the workman’s wife now who is organising the women.
There is no bread. The children are hungry.

Kerensky emerges with a flower in his hand, and the first
revolution. Over an elaborately laid dinner table a woman faints
in hysteria because Kerensky speaks. Men on the front are still
caught in barbed wire.

There is still no bread.

They come to arrest the workman again, but he has gone out
to fetch cigarettes. They see his cup on the table, and his wife
watches them. As she hears her husband’s footsteps she flings
the cup through the window and another victim is saved.

The workman goes out to the troops, encamped beyond the city.
As he is addressing them, Kerensky arrives in his car. He
endeavours to have the workman arrested and .shot, but the
peasant, become a leader among the soldiers, welcomes his friend
and urges the men to help their comrades in Petrograd. Kerensky
dashes ^away in his car.

The attack on the Winter Palace begins. When light comes,
at dawn, the wife goes through the courtyard slowly, with a small
pail of potatoes, in search of her husband. She sees a body and
starts in fear, but it is not her husband. He is alive and further
on, the guard assures her. On her way they call her to help with
a badly wounded soldier. The men are hungry. They look at
the potatoes, and she shares some out. There are only a couple
left when she sees the peasant lying wounded against the parapet.
She hands him the last and comes empty-handed to her husband.
But he is alive, and with the night a new era has arisen and St.
Petersburg has become — Leningrad.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Pudo’sljkin himself has stated that he wished to illustrate an epoch
in this filln, the overthrow of th^ Tzarist regime by the World War
and the flevolution. Scene after scene was scrapped if the acting
seemed theatrical, and as far as possible people were used who had
not, before been filmed. Chuvelef was an accountant and
appeared previously only in a few shots in Mother. The men in
the crowds were workers and soldiers. And, Pudovkin added, he
wanted the spectator to recognise the hero of the film in every
Russian and in every German soldier.

The cumulative effect upon the spectator of the scenes of hysteria
upon the outbreak of war, followed by the trenches and Lebedeff
sequence cross cutting with each other, cannot be described.
Pudovkin is vehement, personal, the Euripides of the screen, where
Eisenstein is the Aeschylus. Where injustice has burnt him, he
cannot let his anger go. He is at his best with storm, following
an emotion, loosing his visual sense in a hurricane till everything
but the bones of the incident are swept away in the wind. And
this process of the rending of all but the skeleton happens on the
screen. War is this and child-birth is that, and not flowers and
pretty messages and fine words. But there is hope, there is con-
struction. Experience makes of the peasant a leader, and a city
may change its heart as well as its name.

It would be interesting to know more of Pudovkin 's youth and
what particular incidents awoke this passion against injustice.
Probably much came from his own experience ; the transition frqpi
being a student in chemistry at a university to fighting on the
Russian front must have been abrupt and terrible. It was the
scholars on the English side who felt not only the war, but the
monotony of army life and discipline the most. And, again, much
was probably the result of incidents watched in early childhood.

One slight comment : I did not myself care so much for the short
sequence at the end of the film where Kerensky addresses the
army. It serves to re-introduce the workman and the peasant,
but I felt it to be not quite so intense and realistic as the rest of
the film. Others, however, admire it. And it is but one moment
from a film which, as a whole, is one of the greatest that, has been

PUDOVKIN

made. It is Eisenstein’s treatment of Kerensky in Ten ifays that
spoils one for any other rendering ®f this incident.

The End of St, [Petersburg has been shown with grea\: success
in New York and in parts of America, but in a cut version. I
have not been able to find out exactly what parts were omitted.
It has also been shown by various film societies in several different
countries in Europe, including the London Film Society. I can see
myself no reason why it should not be universally shown. It shows
war as it is, but as w^e speak continually of our desire for peace we
cannot logically refuse it on these grounds. And it is a film of
great beauty, dignity and cinematic interest, it is banned because
it is a serious work of art, instead of a mob-and-wolf studio
fabrication. Knowing this does not make the insult to one’s
intelligence easier to bear. Why are we, who have boasted of the
liberty of England throughout Europe, denied the intellectual
freedom of the C'ontinent?

Storm Over Asia. They asked us if we would see the Russian
version with Russian sub-titles, but added, doubtfully, when we
said yes, “ it is anti-English.”

They used to say in the near East, “ an Englishman’s word is
as good as his bond.” They used to say across Europe that an
Englishman was mad, but that he had a sense of justice. So
positive a statement has usually some foundation of fact. And
though the war jolted into consciousness that the English were
ncft nearly so impartial as they w^ere made out to be, still there
remains a tradition of seeing both sides, and it always comes as a
slight shock, the realisation that we have lost the one reputation
abroad, of which we might well have been proud.

Mongolia. Marco Polo. I could not be parted from his travels,
I remember, when I read them first ; I was ten, I think, somewhere
along the white hot dusty banks of the Loire. Giant roots of
ginger, the right to commandeer horses upon the mere holding up
of the gerfalcon tablet, rough wild Tartars living on their mares —
I liked them so much better at that age than the studious Chinese.

I always came back to them, after the other travels. Genghis

■

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Khan, r\ding towards Europe; to all the wide sweep of Asia from
Tibet tou artary and the little ispice islands scattered from China
to Ceylo^t.

Later, there were other books. On Tibet chiefly. On the
seai;ch for treasure — dinosaur eggs and seeds. Kingdon Ward
and Chapman Andrews. The account of a woman who went to
Lhassa. Lissus, rope bridges and primitive hill dwelling tribes.

I knew the geography if I had never been to Mongolia.

It began — perfectly — with cloud, wide sky, short grass and small
round huts. •

Bair, a young hunter, crawls on the mountain side and shoots
with great difficulty an arctic fox. The fur is very valuable. (Bair
is played by Inkischinof, said to be himself a Mongolian film
director.) He wishes to sell it for a high price to obtain help
for his invalid mother. Men have come to the tent on their way
to market. Children peep at the strangers and scramble back to
their skin bed. A priest chants. Bair fingers the fox skin and
looks at his mother. The priest wishes to take the skin as pay-
ment, but Bair snatches it from him and in the scuffle an amulet
drops to the ground. Bair is scolded by his parents for his having
dared to dispute with the priest, but as he leaves the tent his mother
hangs the amulet round his neck.

Men ride into the fur market. The crowd scenes are magnificent
and must have been very difficult to photograph. It is interesting
to watch the different types and nationalities in this sequence. One
would like to see the film over and over from merely thC ethfio-
graphical point of view.

Fur merchants, American and European, watch the market.
Spies come with word of any choice skins that may be brought in.
They hurry with news of Bair. Presently all are collected in the
big fur hall.

They pay only a little for skins that have taken months to
collect. The chief trader picks up the fox skin and throw^s Bair
a few coppers. Bair flings them back furiously and tries to take
up his skin. In the fight that follows he wounds the trader, and
money, furs and natives scatter in all directions.

PUDOVKIN

Bair turns for the hills and runs into the midst of a troop insur-
gents fighting the foreign troops stationed in the country, k lovely
sequence follows of a running fight across an uphill rocky'.t:ountry,
full of tall trees, stones and tiny ravines. Bair aids one of the
rebels, and arriving at the top of the pass is given a lift on^one
of their horses. At the gathering place he discovers by the fireside
that the young soldier is a woman — with a baby. His face is at
first incredulous, and then he bursts into shouts of laughter. He
becomes one of the band. But that same night its leader dies
from wounds received in the fight. This is a perfect reconstruction
of the primitive reaction to death. Each soldier stays with him
a moment and then waits a little way off. Alone, he and a great
tree die together.

Up to this moment the film has been a perfect whole. It is
not only the chronicle of the life of any Mongolian hunter, but a
record of the life of a hunting, non-agricultural people.

The section following is as great, but it seems almost like a
second story. A great ceremony with religious dances is planned
by the lamas in honour of the foreigners. The General (L.
Dedinzeff) is shown dressing for the occasion. He takes his bath,
is massaged, his uniform is over-brushed and his boots more than
cleaned. In an adjoining room his wife (L. Billinskaya) has her
hair waved, puts on jewels. Cutting across these scenes are shots
of the ceremonial dressing of the religious dancers, the adjustment
of head-dresses and masks. The General, his wife, and some
o^cers^et into cars and plunge out through the mud. The wheels
shake over the ridges till the engine, it seems, must drop in pieces.
They arrive at last in front of the lamaserie.

The ceremonial dances of Mongolia have never been recorded in
a film before, and very few travellers have been permitted to see
thern. Drums and long trumpets mingle with fantastic head-
dresses and masks. (If an Englishman had brought this record
back, all the schoolchildren possible w'ould be taken to see it by
empire and educational leagues and societies.) But it is all ritual
and ceremony, the dancers do not really believe, and they are
tired, blowing trumpets, beating drums. Yet superstition forbids
them to stop.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

The General, his wife and the officers advance up the long
courtyara, tiny figures in the midst of figures. It is symbolic of
so man^ useless observances. They exchange ' the requisite
presents, pin on orders- It is all very correct. Great Power
bovyng to Great Power. They walk slowly into the hall, lined
with Chinese, with Lamas, with Mongolians, all watching, but
pretending not to watch. The sensation of heat and incense
becomes overpowering.

Cross cutting with the ceremony are shots of the foreign troops
riding to surprise a Mongolian village. The men,# warned,
escape, but the herds are captured. On their return, however,
the Mongolian surprise them in a narrow valley, A few survivors,
with a prisoner, get through to the safety of the camp.

Prayers — soldiers riding.

Incense and drums beating. Frightened sheep, a man dying.

The General and his wife come to the centre of the festival, to a
child of three wrapped in silk, sitting on a mat. The incarnation
of Buddha or an early saint. One toe rubs against the other in
a moment’s play. Then the child is as silent as the watchers.
And both the General and his wife, having a sentimental love of
children, pity. Pity the child because it is there, denied play and
denied air, and pity because it is said that these children usually
die young — conditions of life, or so that they shall not wield
political power. The lamas watch. The General salutes. It is
easy to recognise authority based on the same foundation as one’s
own.

A soldier bursts into the midst of this, frightened and breathle*ss.
He is held back. Ceremonies must not be disturbed. An officer
slips over to him, comes back and whispers. The General smiles.
It is a joke. He congratulates the lamas, through the interpreter,
on the ceremony. And excuses the interruption. The ifian —
unlearned — knew no better. The Chinese watch. They know
something has happened. But the General is as inscrutable as the
Chinese.

And here, it seems, Pudovkin has been more than fair. He
might have made the General out a coward or a bully. He has
done neither. He has shown him meeting defeat and a very serious

PUDOVKIN

position — they are alone, a handful^ among thousands of fjotential
enemies — and he remains calm ana immovable as the far^s about
him, 'with courage enough to go through the ceremony as if nothing
had happened. As a matter of fact, the General is the victim of
a system of education that discounts vision. Military discipline
does not permit thought. And he would be as intolerant of an
Englishman who did not share his views as of any fur-hunting
native. But as he is presented here he keeps dignity and is not an
exaggerated type.

The car% turn toward the camp. Now they are away they can
look at each other and discuss the seriousness of the position.
Horses appear on the horizon— their own men or rebels? The
General takes out his revolver, his wife bursts into tears (she has
probably dreaded this moment for months), but it is their soldiers
that ride up, come to the rescue.

At the camp Bair is tied, a prisoner. “ Shoot him,*’ the General
says, and goes on to a council. An officer goes into the soldiers*
quarters. The men lie there, bored, resentful of the mud, reading
old papers. Orders are whispered. A man, hating the job, gets
into his uniform. What a different treatment this is of the opposite
side, from that which is given to rebels in films which present the
anti-revolution point of view. The soldiers are represented as
human beings ; not as idiots or brutes. The soldier prods Bair in
front of him and they wade through the mud and slime out towards
open country. When they get to the hills he offers the Mongolian
a cigarette. But Bair’s hands are tied and he does not smoke.
Instead, he smiles. Angry that he should have made the gesture
and loathing the job, but without courage enough to refuse to
carry out orders, the soldier orders Bair to walk on. The
Mongglian, not understanding, moves on, smiling. The soldier
fires and fires again, with unsure aim, until at last Bair drops,
rolling over and over, down the precipice.

At the council they have turned Bair’s things over and found
the amulet. It contains a paper stating that he is the direct
descendant of Genghis Khan. An idea strikes them. They could
set him up as king, under their influence, to counteract the revolt.

But the^ have ordered him to be shot.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Officers rush out; they meet the soldier. Perhaps Bair is not
dead. j-They struggle down \he precipice and drag him up, an
indistinguishable lump of mud.

Doctors work over him. Not a detail is omitted. Blood, un-
bandaged wounds, an operation. It is as complete as the scientific
record of Mechanics of the Brain, And Bair lives.

A bundle of silk robes and bandages, he is set on the Mongolian
throne. Foreign women come in, well meaning, but vulgar in
their curiosity. He is such a king. (But they took no notice of
the young Mongolian in the market.) They sit — and Jmile — and
stare. And lest it should be said that this is exaggerated, I have
myself seen women behave as foolishly in the Near East. They
seem to lose all sense of proportion, when it comes to the question
of a chief. Even if it is a chief of a dozen mud huts and fifty
inhabitants. Naturally, not all English people behave in this
manner, mercifully only a few of them. But as it is a joke among
ourselves, do not let us reproach this bit of the film at least for
being anti-Engli.sh.

Bair says nothing, notices nothing. He sits there as if dead,
with his eyes fixed on a bowl of goldfish. Left at last for a moment
he struggles to the table, to pull off the cloth, to lie with the water
from the broken bowl streaming over him, to reach towards free-
dom, freedom. . .

A reception is prepared in his honor. The General’s daughter
meets her fianc^. He has brought her a present, a fur, Bair’s
own fox fur. And Bair puts his hand on it. He begin*' to
remember.

Shortly afterwards a young Mongolian, trying to escape, is shot
in front of him, brutally.

Bair goes mad. (The impression given by these scenes between
the rescue of Bair from the ravine and this moment is that he
was in a state almost of amnesia. The fur, and finally the shock
of seeing the man killed, in the way he had been shot, in front of
him, brought back his full memory.) He flings the silk from his
shoulders and snatches a sword. He throws chairs over. In the
darkness soldiers stumble over each other, furniture crashes. Bair
leaps from the window and rides off to the steppes. And in a

PUDOVKIN

symbolic storm of sand, and Tartars riding, and the General and
his soldiers being blown over and* over, the film ends. ^

And this, according to a recent English criticism in a well-known
newspaper, is “ a little ridiculous.”

Yet, having seen the film, I cannot see why they called it Anti-
English. I cannot see why it could not be shown freely and fully
in London, without cuts or revisions, to soothe our supposedly so
susceptible minds.

For wl^at does it say in essence but this. Any force of foreign
troops in a strange land is bound to be resented by the inhabitants.
There are bound to be uprisings. And those risings are going to
be put down by force. And force means cruelty.

Does any Englishman suppose it is possible to maintain an
army in a foreign country without force? And war is not a game,
and I myself could never understand the people in the war who
cried out about air-raids and attacks on civilians. Either you
have war or you have peace. If you have war, there seems to be
no logical difference between setting a man to kill someone he has
never seen or dropping a bomb on a town. It is not a game with
rules — it is war. And as long as people are uneducated there
will always be the risk of battles. Only we shall have to find a
new word for education, for I do not mean by the term someone
who has learnt a number of books by heart — I have known so many
people, for instance, who have passed through universities with
honor but yet have remained completely uneducated. It is rather
an* equ^ balance of development, to attain to equal sense of body
and of mind, not of one of these to the exclusion of the other, as
is the case usually at present.

I think that imperialism in its time achieved a great deal of good.
The {rouble is that the world has outgrown imperialism, but the up-
holders of it, who would lose their positions by its destruction,
refuse to acknowledge the fact. It is like a father and son. A
father will brave any danger to protect his child, but will sacrifice
that child’s ultimate happiness willingly rather than permit him to
follow a trade of which he, the father, does not approve. We have
all, in our experience, known cases of the sort.

ULM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

The iiicursion of Europe into Asia from the eighteenth century
to the present day undoubtedly f)aved the way for thejmodernization
of the East. And this was an excellent thing. For conditions in
the East are deplorable. People say that the East is romantic.
I could never imagine why. It is powerful and interesting and
full of a non-Western wisdom. But it is also full of dirt and
disease, and terror and injustice. I think no one who has ridden
into the desert at dusk will forget the experience, nor the way
gazelles scatter on the horizon, like a mirage that disperses, nor
camel and young camel edging their way between egg’ pile and
scarlet saddles ; but neither will one forget the childrens’ faces,
black with flies, the ignorant, beaten women, the smallpox and
the superstition.

Where we have failed in England, and lamentably failed, is in
our lack of provision of educational facilities for the natives. Now
this is not a “ red ” statement. I read it almost weekly in the
pages of The Times Educational Supplement. We have supported
native autocracy and countenanced its endurance of a class of serfs.
We have made no real attempt to introduce compulsory education
into India nor those parts of Africa that are under British rule.
We have made some half-hearted attempts to improve the position
of women, but we have never had courage enough to put an end
to the merciless exploitation of women and children in the East.
It may be argued that had we done so, we should have lost India.
To which it may be answered, that it were better to have lost it
fighting for an idea that the world might respect, than to lose it
because native autocracy breaks and the serfs pour over the land,
remembering only centuries of oppression.

A great number of Englishmen have gone out to the East and
worked there without thought of personal safety. They have built
roads and hospitals and given time and consideration to the natives’
needs. And they have usually come up against exactly the same
sort of rigid narrow-minded English official that Pudovkin has
portrayed in the General. Look at Burton’s struggle with
authority when he would go wandering as an Arab into Sindh.
And what does Doughty say on the matter in Arabia Deserta.
“ At first I had asked of the Waly, Governor of Syria, l;»is license

PUDOVKIN

to accompany the Haj caravan to the distance of Median Salih,
The Waly then privately questionedf the British Consulate^ an office
which is of much regard in these countries. The Consul answered
that his was no charge in any such matter ; he had as much regard
of me, would I take such dangerous ways, as of his old hat. This
was a man that, in time past, had proffered to show me a good
turn in my travels, who now told me it was his duty to take no
cognisance of my Arabian journey, lest he might hear any word of
blame, if I miscarried.’*

Unhapfftly, the arrogant attitude of the General is more obvious
and more often remembered than the efforts of a dozen Englishmen
eager to give help. I remember an English officer saying to me
in the Near East : “ Don’t speak gently to these niggers, they
don’t understand it. When you speak to them, give an order.”
And I deeply regretted my inability to knock him dow^n. Yet at
the same time another Englishman said : ” There is no difference
between an intelligent Oriental and an intelligent Englishman.”
But the officer would do more harm in six months than the other
man had accomplished good in years of study of, and friendship
w’ith, the natives.

So do let us forget the ostrich trick of burying our head in the
sand. And let us face the unpleasant truth that our stay in the
East depends entirely upon the type of men we send out there and
the ideas they try to apply. Pudovkin himself has said, lecturing
in Berlin, that the really artistic film producer must either love or
ha^, aiyl that Dickens, whom nobody would accuse of being a
Bolshevik, always made his heroes poor and the officials unpleasant
characters. But I see no reason to drag Dickens into the dis-
cussion, I do not think the English as portrayed in Storm Over
Asia are exaggerated. I do think, however, they are rare, and
that many hundreds of Englishmen have done wwk in the East
which has prepared the way for its forthcoming development.

Storm Over Asia provoked storm in Berlin. Newspapers forgot
their politics and united in praising it as a work of art. Police
were called out to control the crowds trying to get tickets. Per-
formances w^ere sold out days beforehand. Pudovkin gave lec-
tures, in yhich he pleaded for the liberty of the artist, and went to

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Amsterdam to address the Film Liga there. It is to be hoped that
the film eventually will be shown in London.

PudovKin has written several books on the cinema, of which one
has been translated into German, under the title of Film Regie und
Film Manuscript, published by Verlag Lichtbildbuhne at five marks
(five shillings). It was rumored a translation was coming out in
England. He also wrote, in conjunction with Eisenstein and
Alexandroff, an article on Sound Films, which was published in
Close Up, October, 1928. He has also just finished acting the
chief part in The Living Corpse, directed by F. Ozep. *

It is difficult to speak of his work as a whole, for it is still in
process of evolution. His films are lyrical, impulsive and turbulent
always. No one has understood war better nor treated it more
truthfully. It is interesting to wonder what his next film will be :
all those he has made have been so different from one another.
His task will be difficult after Storm Over Asia, but no doubt a new
surprise will emerge from some totally other direction.

lom 'I Ju StufK I*’' \K‘ \

CHAPTER V.

Alexander Room.

Alexander Room was born in Vilna, an important commercial
town in western Russia, now become a part of Poland. He
attended the Gymnasium there until he had finished his education.
He then went to Moscow, where he became a journalist, and was
also for a time assistant at a small theatre. He studied in
Kulcshof’s school and began cinema work about five years ago.
He has made three films to date. The Death Ship, Bed and Sofa,
and The Pits.

Two qualities are apparent in his work : one of them is his
overwhelming interest in sociology, and the other is his desire to
portray mental states to the exclusion of extraneous matter.
Nothing, for instance, will be introduced to suggest atmosphere
(as, for example, the two figures in The End of St. Petersburg
seen through the giant legs of the great statue), but external
objects are emphasized only when they become important to the
people with whom he is dealing and in that exact moment of their
mental con.sciousness, as when the woman in Bed and Sofa picks
up the cat^s head, which she had seen day in and day out for
months, but had not noticed with her inner mind until the moment
it became part of her struggle to decide whether to leave her
husfiand or not. Room studied the work of Freud and other
modern psychologists for years, and the result of such study is
apparent in his work. He is the most modern in outlook, perhaps,
of Russian directors, for social problems dominate him, sometimes
to his disadvantage. One would know that his interests, for
instance, would be journalism and literature were the cinema not
invented, just as one would surmise that Pudovkin would be

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

interested in painting. Room is particularly notable in his
handling of male psychology ; o\ie feels he has knowp and studied
men morl than women. And that is the defect of his method.
He has studied the psychology of ordinary life so well and has
phot^ographed it so accurately that where his perception has failed
the defect is far more glaring than it would be in the work of a
man who showed rather what he himself would see, than what
would be seen by the person in the film.

Eighteen months ago all Germany talked of Bed and Sofa. It
became tiresome in any cinematic discussion to be silented with,
“ But you don’t know, you can’t judge, you haven’t seen Bed and
Sofa.** For at the time one was Ibarely conscious of the cinemato-
graphic existence of Russia, except that Eisenstein had made
Potemkin. And, of course, at that moment the general release of
the picture in the Berlin kinos had ended. I remember we drove
through the rain and between streets of tall, compact modern
buildings out into a far suburb of Berlin, hearing that the film was
showing there in a tiny kino, only to find on arrival that the time
had been changed and we could not see it. Finally (as we were
leaving Germany) we discovered it at Hamburg.

We sat first through one of the dreariest films it has been my
misfortune to see. Perhaps even the projectionist was bored. At
any rate, the reels hopped through the machine so quickly that
people moved by clockwork instead of walking ! A complicated,
old-fashioned plot added threads to itself that experience of bad
films told one would have to be unravelled in appropriate' movie
manner. And all the time there was the thought “ this is the last
day, and suppose there is no showing of Bed and Sofa after all.”

Finally the film ended, lights went up, girls munched chocolates,
old ladies dropped wet umbrellas and wiped their spectacles. *We
read again in our programme that Room’s film was a study of
modern Russia. And at last the kino darkened and a title flashed
on the screen ; Bctt iind Sofa.

It opens in a room : a quite familiar room, not completely of
the slums, but too crowded with things to be comfortable.
Moscow, we are reminded, suffers from a housing shortage. A

ROOM

husband and wife are in bed together. It is morning^ A cat
stirs them. The husband (N. BatAlof) snatches it up, he is young
but settled, seeing his wife now as something stable like’^he chair,
not as something alive and full of movement like the animal. And
the wife (played by Ludmila Semenova) is aware of this. She is
brooding and resentful. Bored with the constant nagging suc-
cession of household duties, cooking in the tiny room, keeping it
clean when so encumbered and having nowhere to put her clothes.
Hundreds of daily trifles that prickle like pins. The husband
rushes oift to his work on a building high above Moscow. There
are trams in the distance and a sense of work and space.

A printer (V. Fogel) sits on a train coming towards Moscow.
His bundle of belongings is beside him. Work is easily got, they
say, but they cannot give him a room. But he is in the city, and
until he gets tired and his bundle heavy, he wanders about, asking
for a room without result, but examining everything with interest.
Suddenly he and the husband meet ; they used to know each other.

No room, but we have a sofa,** the husband says. So there
are to be three now in the tiny room that has scarcely been wide
enough for himself, his wife and the cat.

The wife is surprised and resentful. It is bad enough to have
to clean and cook for another man, but besides, the husband has
shown so obviously that he does not value their relationship by
thus breaking into their privacy. The printer realises this and in
little subtle ways, by helping in the room, by small gifts, tries to
miike u^ for the trouble he has caused.

The husband is called away. The friend wishes to leave. But
the husband insists he must stay. The inevitable happens and
after a lovely shot that gave all the movement of the air, waving
grass: under aeroplane wings (they take a flight round Moscow),
the wife and friend become lovers.

Life is new again and exciting. Until the husband suddenly
returns with a huge basket of berries. His wife (owing to his
absence) has again become alive for him. They do not know what
to do, how to tell him ; finally he understands and goes out himself
through Moscow seeking for a place to sleep.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

But there is no place. It rains. He goes back for his coat
and clothes. 7'he wife, upset’ by the two emotions, old habit,
new love* points to the sofa. After all, there is no room in
Moscow. And it is raining and stormy. He puts his things away.
There are three again in the room.

The men resume their old friendship, though in both there is a
curious antagonism. They play chess; while the wife watches
at the window, all nerves, suddenly startled by the sudden light
of a car. The evening drags on. No one wants to be the first
to suggest bed. •

The husband goes to buy some food. On his return the others
are in the bed together and the sofa is ready for him. He shrugs
his shoulders, goes to sleep. After all, he has a roof over his
head and it is raining outside.

Days pass : the situation is too tense to go on long. The wife
is ill, realises she is going to have a child. Whose? They scratch
their heads. Abortion is legal under certain conditions in Russia.
The wife takes the necessary papers to the hospital.

And here Room fails.

Up to this moment the film has been magnificent. It has been
true to what happens in hundreds of families. For it is merely the
housing shortage that confines the action to one room. Psycho-
logically the situation happens in hundreds of English homes.
The husband grows to regard the wife as something to be always
there, like the house. Someone else comes along who sees the
woman as a human being. Sometimes this leads to fiivorcb,
sometimes to intrigue. Oftener to half an intrigue which ends in
the two men developing a violent friendship for each other to the
exclusion of the woman. The only difference between the Russian
film and what happens over and over again in other countries is
that the three are not confined to the same bedroom.

But there is a break, a concession to popular ideas, in the finish
of the film. The wife arrives at the hospital, looks out of the
window, sees a child playing with a doll, rushes out, and is shown
going towards the country in a train. She is going to have the
child. And that is just what that kind of woman in that kind of

\icoUi J3atal'‘t' in Btd fUtd Sof

1 ^itULMlON .1

in Hid dtui Sofii

ROOM

circumstance would not have done. She would not have wanted
a child born of such tangled, resentful happenings, for the
child’s own sake. The passive ncf^lect and i^i^noring of all her
feelings by the husband led to the circumstance : probably the
solution would have been to have left Moscow with the other qian.
The maternal instinct of the woman had led her to re-admit the
husband. No, circumstances were loo involved for her to have
had the baby.

But Room, as may be seen in a later film. The Pits, is much
concerned with this problem of husband, wife and child.

Bed and Sofa ends with the two men coming back to the empty
room ; they look at each other and scratch their heads. And Room
somehow conveys in their glances that they are really wondering,
not how the woman is getting on or whether she has money, but
who will wash and cook for them.

Even with the jar at the end, this must remain one of the great
films of the world. It obliterates so many trials, experiments
and ifs. There is no further need to talk about what the cinema
might do. Here is accomplishment. It gives to the spectator
instead of taking from him : a novel sensation to those used to
the ordinarily projected films. Room has obtained his effects by
using the correct psychological basis for all actions, however
minute, and by his capacity to set symbols of the brain processes,
in pictures. He gives moods, too, with alternating space and
confinement : the husband running down the building, the wife
waiting at the window.

Bed and Sofa has been successfully shown throughout Russia.
It ran in ordinary cinemas throughout Germany for months. In
France it has been shown at the Studio 28 and privately. The
censor there, however, insisted upon its being called Trois Dans
Un Sous-sol (Three in a Basement). It has been forbidden in
Holland. It is among the chief events of the London Film
Society’s programme for 1929.

Room’s first film. The Death Ship (Der Todesharke)^ is quite
different in texture, though it has many of his characteristics.
Even if one did not know, one would judge it to be an early

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

attempt, for it has a curious authentic boy-adventure-book quality
and one of the best portrayals 6f a small boy I have seen in films.
How goofi Russians are with children. They show them as they
are and not as adults would have them be. The little girl in
His Son, standing by the baby’s coffin, puzzled and frightened,
with* her completely hurt, bewildered indignation when the old
woman strikes her hand from the dead body ; the smug, preening,
imagc-of-her-mother girl in Das Dorf, and the boy in this film,
romantic, mischievous, frightened and courageous in the same
five minutes, these are real children, individual childreh, as we
ourselves (if we have been willing to see) have known them.
Compare them with the dressed up puppets trotting through
English or American films, all curls, kisses and deliberate plot to
do the thing that will please grown-up people and win most
admiration.

The Death Ship has been generally released throughout Ger-
many. I have not traced it in Switzerland. It has probably been
shown in France. I saw it in Berlin by courtesy of Prometheus,
who control the German release.

It is the story of the struggle between the Reds and the Whites
on the shores of the Black Sea. But it is not a propaganda film ;
the story merely demands two rival factions and could equally
well apply to any other historical period, Cromwell and the
Royalists, for instance. There is no reason why it should not be
shown in England, where it would probably prove most popular
with the young. They like adventure stories, and it is certainly
better to show them an adventure that has a basis in reality than
a film of pirates performing impossible feats.

Perhaps the first thing that startles one about the picture is
the authentic quality of the landscape, part Balkan, part southern.
It has the peculiar glittering quality of the sea in that region,
crackling with sun-points, and strange, sparse rocks edging
cypress-studded hills.

An old engineer is sitting in his cottage. Neither White nor
Red matter to him, only the engines of his ship. His son has
joined the Reds and that annoys him ; people have no business

ROOM

to meddle with politics. The little boy, his second son, plays with
animals in the garden. The motlter prepares dinner. And here
is where Room’s psychological studies are so valuable. A
pleasant, comfortable, almost peasant woman, all smiles and
cheerfulness, and a father, rather artistic, self-absorbed and a
little tyrannical, would have sons such as these in the film ; revo-
lutionary and brooding, like the elder, or a little inclined to build
up a phantasy world, like the small boy. In the few shots at the
beginning the family world itself is shown ; background that will
be needed to emphasize the ending of the picture.

The town is controlled by the Whites. There is trouble in the
barracks. Dissatisfaction grows ; ammunition disappears. The
Whites suspect it to be partly due to someone on the engineer’s
ship. They put their best spy to work on the boat with promise
of reward. One night there is a scuffle in the barracks, sudden
alarm, and a soldier escaping into darkness.

The Red sympathizers live in a small room on the outskirts of
the town. Their job is to pass on fugitives and ammunition to
the opposite shore. The girl in charge is engaged to the
engineer’s son. The soldier bursts into the room, his brief, startled
words contrasting with the calm, dark southern night.

A tall Mohammedan in sheepskins rides across the hill with
ammunition. He looks to the sea. The Reds should be nearing
land to collect his heavy bag. It is desolate country. But some-
one ha« betrayed him. Right between the hills the Whites ride,
and before his horse can climb the slopes he is shot down by a
bullet.

The gramophone plays in the engineer’s cottage. The little boy
danefes while his mother cuts out clothes. Soldiers break in and
drag the engineer away before the record has time to play itself
out.

Men, women and children, all the suspects they can gather, have
been flung into the hold of a ship. Each day a few of them are
dragged up, flung overboard. The engineer sits grieving over his
engines. Who will oil them or clean them? The girl, engaged

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

to his son, is flung down the steps after him. One by one the
captives diminish, children die.*^

But scftne fugitives, and the engineer's son among them, have
escaped to an old lighthouse. The cruelty in the ship has increased
the hostility of the town to the Whites.

The officers of the Whites decide to send the engineer's ship
against the lighthouse. But they have no one to work the engines.
They remember the engineer. He is sent for and driven below
with threats. His life is safe while he is needed for the machinery.
They take the girl on board as well, thinking by bribes or tortures
they can find out information about the fugitives.

Meanwhile the Reds prepare to fight under the leadership of the
son. The little boy (children pass more easily and unquestioned)
struggles up the hill towards his brother, with food. With news.
The boy was excellent at this moment, a child’s love of adventure
suddenly changing into anxiety as to his father’s fate and then
breaking to adventure again, mixed with a shadow of apprehen-
siveness.

The ship approaches the lighthouse. Well armed, the soldiers
form into a landing party. The spy, drunk and lazy, refuses to
attend to the engines. From a chance word, the engineer realises
he is directing the boat against his own son. But if the machinery
is not looked after there will be an explosion. An idea strikes
him, and he does not force the spy to continue work.

Meantime the girl has been questioned and tortured apd flurg
back into a cabin. An explosion shakes the boat. It lurches,
settles for sinking. Men jump into the sea. Waist high in water,
the engineer struggles along a corridor, banging on doors till he
finds and drags the girl to the upper deck.

The lighthouse watchers crowd to the sea edge, watching the
boat sink. There are no survivors. Only the engineer is washed
ashore. He has just consciousness enough to realise that his son
is safe before he dies.

The Death Ship is perhaps a succession of flashes, of great but
loosely-knit moments rather than one coherent film ; the drive of

ROOM

the idea looses impetus between moments so that the final impres-
sion leaves one feeling that it is a good film instead of being great :
comparing it, say, with Bed and Sofa, or Ten Days or Das Dorf,
Yet to write this may be to be over-critical, for much of it is
excellent, particularly the treatment of the landscape, the lonely
sheepskin figure watching the sea, the fugitives scattered about
the lighthouse wall, or the sensation of sunlight in the engineer’s
garden. Room has the capacity perhaps to deal with a small,
rather than with a large, group. He is excellent again on the
ship, where the spy and the sailors quarrel, fight suddenly, and go
back in a flash to drinking and playing cards. The scenes with
the girl, on the other hand, are less successful ; one is almost
afraid he will slide over into the conventional Hollywood torture-
and-sudden-rescue, though again the shot of her caught in the
water-filling cabin and the struggle of the engineer up the steps
with her is realistic and full of power. But on the whole this
film is full of the beginnings of cinema ; it has not the sure direction
back of it that made Bed and Sofa, Between the two films Room’s
power of direction and conception of film must have widened and
changed.

The Pits, Room’s third film, is quite a different type of story.
It is said that it was founded upon an idea sent to him by a
workers’ club, and many of the people filmed had never acted for
the screen before. In Russia it is called Ochave, of which
a literary translation is the rough, or the uneven, road,
i't has* never been shown publicly outside Russia as far as I can
discover. I was shown it in Berlin by courtesy of the Russian
Handelsvertretung, the office for relations with foreign trade. A
Tull account and appreciation of the film, by Kenneth Macpherson,
appeared in the October issue of Close Up.

The Pits deals with one of the most important problems (perhaps
the most important) of civilization. It is a matter that affects
alike all classes and countries, whatever the political color of their
rulers. From the adaptation of people to the question spring
hatred and tolerance, strength and sickness, happiness and
tragedy. Yet it is a theme that has seldom been handled in all

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

its angles except in psychological documents or Russian films.
For the problem is that of the* relationship between husband and
wife and ♦how it may be broken by the birth of a child.

The film opens with some lovely shots of a glass foundry.
The workers* club and out-of-door activities mix with shots
of fhe men and women at work, and with spring in a country
landscape. Blossoms and leaves. A man, employed in the fac-
tory, has fallen in love with one of the girl workers. Their lives
together run smoothly and happily until a baby disrupts their
companionship. Through changes, too, at the factory; the girl
loses her job. She attempts to bring up her child, not knowing
otherwise, according to old methods. Faced with loss of all he
had valued in his wife, with dirty clothes, the baby crying, and a
constant reminder of its presence in the washing hanging on a
string across the one small room, the man takes to drinking, fails
in his work, and in his general mental chaos goes to live with
another woman. The girl loses all impetus to live and is baffled
by the immensity of the problem in front of her. She docs not
know what to do. The baby cries. Its constant needs drive her
distracted. Yet under the conditions pertaining in most countries
they would be allowed to drift from bad to worse, blamed for their
faults but shown no way to remedy errors, until the man would
become so demoralized and antagonistic he would simply drift
from woman to woman, and the girl would become another un-
skilled worker with no hope before her, while the child would
probably die through want of proper care. But in The ?Hts tf^
workers* club and, in particular, the head of the woman *s section
(played by V. Baranovskaya), prove their usefulness. The girl is
shown how to look after her baby (this, which is one of the most
highly skilled and technical professions in the world, is ' still
supposed to be a natural inborn gift in every woman, as if every
man should be expected to be without training a skilled engineer I),
then she is found work and a place is allotted her baby in the
children’s home, where twenty or thirty children receive trained
care from a specialist instead of being dragged up by old, hap-
hazard methods, and where she may visit it after her work is
finished. The man is left to come to his senses alone.

ROOM

At this moment the film seems to go to pieces badly. All the
beginning is consistent and absolutely true. But for some reason
at this instant a theatrical scene is inserted (can Room I^ave been
responsible for it ?) in which the wife, having resumed her activities
in the workers’ club, acts in a play, the theme of which is her own
story. Her husband sits watching her in the audience and •she
works herself up into a fit of hysterics, denouncing him for
abandoning her and the child. She even follows this up by fainting
in the best 1880 manner I The man dashes out, and thoroughly
ashamed Jbut unwilling to confess his fault, works so badly that
there is a question of his being discharged. The girl, however,
has applied to be transferred to a new factory. The husband
makes the same request independently. And the picture ends with
their chance meeting on the steamer that is taking them all towards
a new, united life in the distant factory.

The theme is excellent, but the scene towards the finish is
impossible. Kenneth Maepherson, in his excellent appraisement
of the film in Close Up, October, 1928, suggests that Room listened
to all the people who criticised Bed and Sofa for its lack of tech-
nique and tried to show that he was as good a technician as
anybody. Or is it possible that the workers’ clubs were not ready
for sheer psychology and insisted upon melodrama at the end?
Or is Room himself undecided, as in Bed and Sofa, seeing the
obvious results of present conventions, but unable to scrap them
utterly in his mind? For this is the great problem of the world,
tL‘is question of mother and father and child, and it can be met
only in two ways. The one way is the old : the woman must
be a slave, without education and without rights, drudging her
way along, dominated by the man and having no outlet but sex.
And*because she is so emotionally close to the child (psychologists
have stated that sixty per cent, of all influence upon future develop-
ment comes from the mother) too often she deflects or spoils its
character, through love, through hatred, through ignorance. The
other way is the new, not by any means fully accepted even in
Russia, with the woman trained and equal to the man ; his com-
panion, neither a serf nor a marriage-licensed gold-digger. That

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

way means the world steps forward. But a woman cannot be a
companion and a worker if she has to do double labor ; she cannot
keep up i-vith the events of the day while practical necessity binds
her to the nursery. And a baby needs constant attention. First
impressions in a child mould its future character. But too often
chilviren spend valuable years unlearning habits that with proper
training they would never have acquired, and this applies just as
much to families of the wealthier classes as to the poor. But
how can any woman look after a house and train a baby properly
at the same time? To say nothing of the fact that the ♦emotional
responsibility is usually too great for a parent to let its child climb,
run and experiment as freely as it should. The solution, as shown
in The Pits and Das Kind des Anderen {His Son)y and as indicated
in Das Dorf, is the nursery school. The baby school. A place
where babies from birth can have the benefit of expert care.

Those familiar with psychology know that many neuroses and
fears of later life have their origin in the child of two and three
being trained to habits of cleanliness. But I have seen a nursery
school where the children were trained from birth so that there
was no sudden jerk of discipline just when the children were
beginning to reason. This was possible in the school because
one nurse could take up twenty babies hourly one after the other.
It would be absolutely impossible in the home, particularly the
servantlcss one. Objectors to the scheme take the attitude that
unless the mother is made uncomfortable she would not have
children. (A nurse remarked once that it was not wise«to gi»?e
mothers twilight sleep, as unless they suffered pain they might
not love their hahies ! ) This attitude seems to me utterly immoral.
To begin with, an act so involved and dangerous as childbirt-b
should be absolutely voluntary; then the question of what is* best
for the child should be the main consideration. If a child can grow
up free and independent and healthy in a nursery school, it is better
for it to be there than to grow up in an atmosphere of haphazard
care and emotion. There is no suggestion in any of these films
that the child should be severed from its parents. The nursery
school is simply the solution of scientific care being given to all

ROOM

babies alike and not to a few fortunate ones, while the relationship
between husband and wife can colitinue undisturbed. (Far from
being a deterrent it would probably be an encourageme.it to have
a family.) If Room had shown us another household that by
means of this solution had avoided the upheaval that threatened
to wreck the couple’s life in The Pits, or if some quiet scene
between the girl and the man could have brought about the recon-
ciliation, this picture would have been worthy of rank among the
half-dozen great films of the world, but as it is, the shock of the
school-girlish denunciation from the stage of the theatre is so great
that the intensity of the beginning is blotted out and one cannot
believe in the quietness of the end. One longs eagerly to see
Room’s next film. It was rumoured early in 1928 that he would
make a half-Russian and half-German picture based on Maupas-
sant’s Boule de Stiif, but no further news of this has been forth-
coming, although Room was in Berlin for a time during the
summer.

He is now at work in Russia on a new film entitled The Ghost
That Never Returns, from the story by Barbusse. The Pits has
been a great success, it is said, in Russia, but has not yet been
generally released elsewhere.

Room is undoubtedly one of the great directors of the world.
And what interests him most and what he is most successful in
portraying are the processes of the brain which make up ordinary,
normal life. It is this that makes his work amazing, because
things {ire seldom shown, in films or literature or art or education,
as they are. They are almost always colored to what it is felt
the pulDlic expects them to be. Russia, Austria and Germany are
the pioneers of this fight to recognise reality, though even Room
is not daring enough to recognise it always ; he can see the is but
not always the step forward. Though there you have the problem.
Not of the cinema only, but of life. For to see truth means
upheaval.

CHAPTER VI.

The Sociological Film, 1.

The Peasant Women 0 / Riazan is one of the greatest §nd most
beautiful films that has been made. It combines construction,
beauty and dramatic power together with beautiful photography,
as many of the outdoor scenes are done on panchromatic stock.
(Panchromatic costs considerably more than ordinary negative and
is more difficult to develop, but gives all colors approximately their
true value and is therefore far more lovely to watch.) But the
negative was destroyed in the fire at the Afifa works last autumn,
and it is said that there is no other in Russia and that only a few
scratched and worn copies are left. If this is so it is one of the
greatest tragedies that have happened in the history of cinemato-
graphy.

It is also an example of a problem of the Russian film world :
that of keeping down costs. Most Hollywood films have three
negatives ; that is, during all the scenes there are three cameramen
and three machines turning and the development costs are tripled.
Naturally, it is not possible to afford this in Moscow, where the
expenditure must be kept as low as possible. Only, if a nt:gati\/e
gets destroyed, the whole labor of months is lost.

The Peasant Women of Riazan (Das Dorf der Siinde) was
directed by a woman, Olga Ivanovna Priobrashenskaya. (It is*^
Sovkino film, released by Derussa.) She was born in 1886' and
completed the eighth class at the Gymnasium. Afterwards she
studied at the Moscow Art Theatre and acted under the manage-
ment of Stanislavsky, Nemirovitch-Danchenko, Meyerhold,
Mardianof, Tairof, etc., until 1913.

In 1913 she began to act for the films with the firm Timan and
Reinhart.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, I.

In 1916 she started work as cin^a stage manager, at first under
the direction of V. R. Gardin. Her first independent production
was Young Lady — Peasant Woman (based on Pushkin), made in
1916, for the firm of Vengerof. She directed later, for the Neptune
firm, Hamsun’s Victoria, In 1919 she became artistic directpr of
a class of cinema models in the first Gos-Kino school. She is said
to be marvellous as a teacher. And she has worked uninterruptedly
at cinema training from 1920 to the present day. In 1923 she
helped to direct, with V. R. Gardin, the Land-Owner and Lock-
smith and Chancellor, for the Wufku, at Yalta. She has also made
two films for children, The Truth of Fedkin and Kiriliou, and has
just finished another full-length film. The Last Attraction,

Few women to date have used the screen creatively : this is
economic circumstance rather than inability to use the medium.
So much of the commercial cinema depends upon its women stars,
but, apart from acting, opportunities are few, and the creative and
artistic side is almost barren of names. But now, in Russia,
Priobrashenskaya has made a film as great in its way as any
discussed in this book, and one that is also an amazing sociological
and constructive document.

It is utterly free from propaganda, this film. Somehow, a
woman who thinks is freer than a man from political trammels.
It is much harder for a man, perhaps, to break with convention.
But the woman thinker (I admit there are few of them) seeks for
truth.

» And* truth is the underlying principle of The Peasant Women,

It is spring in Russia. Women, in gaily colored skirts, stand
with their w^ashing about the river edge. Long white strips of
sheet bleach on the short turf. Ducks waddle in the mud and
cahes trot about the grass. The washing has to be done whether
there is war or not. But it is pleasant on a spring morning w'hen
the earth is soft about the bank. These scenes are quite un-
hurried and the mind is allowed to rest on them, on the important
things, with no suggestion that fire, avalanche or sudden paste-
board set will blot out reality with their tame expectedness.

The farmer Vassily (E. Fastrebitski) drives back from market
with his son Ivan (C. Babynin). There is a lovely feeling here of

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

the unsteady wheels and at thf same time the certainty and un-
sureness of a ford. Women shout greeting^. A sack drops. Ivan
slides off fhe cart to fetch it and meets Anna (R. Pushnaya), a war
orphan, staring at the branches. They are too shy to be anything
but ,in love.

The cart jolts on along a narrow track between thick flowers.
And it is the road, with its ruts and tall weed, grass and field
blossom, that seems to be important, rather than the men, both
dreaming of Anna. Spring and such tranquillity that one wonders
why the first sub-title spoke of “ the years of war.’*

Vas.silissa (E. Zessarskaya), the farmer’s daughter, drags a baby
calf behind her into the orchard beyond the farm and brushes
through fruit branches to meet her lover, Nikolai, the smith. She
does not hear her father’s cart coming up the road. The young
smith leaps over the hedge and runs through the leaf-patterned
orchard. These shots are full of movement as the wind is.

But the farmer has seen them.

The farmer's wife waits outside the farmhouse door, and with
her Vas.sily's former mistress (O. Narbekova) is standing with her
little girl.

What will he have brought them from market?

The atmosphere is tense over supper. Vassily is furious that
his daughter and the smith love one another. It is jealousy with
him, not any question of fitness. When Vassilissa comes in, the
farmer storms at her and orders her out of the room. She looks
at him, and in that moment O. Priobrashenskaya achieves genius.
For father and daughter look alike in that instant : mentally. The
father’s tyranny has become strength in the girl. In Ivan it has
become weakness. A psychological probability well worked out
throughout the film. Vassilissa turns proudly and walks 'out.
Ivan, shocked and dreaming of Anna, forgets to dip his spoon in
the communal soup bowl. At last the father can vent his anger
upon someone : he dashes a spoonful of hot soup in the boy’s face
and shouts at him, “You dreamer, it is time you married,” and
Ivan, rebellious for once, runs out crying no.

But he cannot endure against his father’s wull. He sits with
his eyes on the floor throughout the bethrothal bargaining. A

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, L

girl lies weeping in a room. It is^only at the final moment, when
they have to look at each other’s faces, that Ivan and^Anna see
that their own wishes have been fulfilled as well as parental com-
mands.

There is shouting and dancing at the marriage feast, though
Anna brings but a little calf and tiny dowry. The former mistress
of Vassily dances, laughing and sweating like a heavy animal.
Suddenly her merriment turns to morose anger, for she has caught
the farmer looking at Anna, and knows what that look means.
In the confusion Vassilissa and the smith slip away to talk to
each other.

The father, angry and frustrated, finds them in the barn. He
storms and threatens. But Vassilissa will not put up with his
anger any longer. If the smith, she says, will promise to respect
her as if she were his wife, she will live with him, since marriage
is not permitted without the father’s consent. Nikolai agrees and
they walk out together.

Summer is short. Bare-footed, Anna follows Ivan to the
cornfields. In the village, pea.sants smear pitch on the smith’s
door and constantly taunt Vassilissa. But what does that matter
so long as they are together ? Corn waves in the fields : long ears
and shadows, light slants and little winds. (Much of this would
not register on ordinary stock. These effects need panchromatic,
as is used here.) But in the middle of work, the bell rings. More
men are needed for war. More conscripts must go, and amongst
v4iem l4ie smith and Ivan.

The villagers go with them up the road and then Vassilissa, as
the men disappear, realises that she will be left alone to the jeers
of the women, and Anna knows there will be no escape from the
jealousy of Ivan’s mother nor from the farmer’s persecution. And
none of them can read or write, so there is no hope of news.

Days go on. The farmer drives back alone from market, drunk.
AVomen spin and gossip and tell tales in the large room. Only
Anna sits alone. As they hear horses clatter through the rain,
women and children slip away.

Vassily comes in with a sack. What has he brought this time
from market? His wife and his mistress have fixed their eyes on

• 87

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

the bag. And he brings out sfeawls for them. But from the very
bottom h^ brings out a better, more bcautiiul shawl for Anna, and
goes, drunk, in search of her.

The mistress, raging with jealousy, follows him.

Anna is in her room, but Vassily breaks through the door.
There is no escape. As the farmer, half ashamed, goes back
through the dark stairway, he meets his former mistress. Both
stare at each other. Guiltily and uneasily.

Months pass. Anna has a baby. There is no news of the
soldiers. But there is peace at last and men begin to drift back
to the village. Nikolai returns, but the war has changed him.
His good temper has gone and he is sullen and over-bearing.
Vassilissa, however, has won by her activity a place on the village
council. A messenger summons her to go and help with the
childrens* home they are making. Nikolai forbids this angrily;
her place is the home, to build the fire and cook for him and to
wait upon his pleasure. But Vassilissa laughs and walks out,
saying simply ** that is at an end. We live in the new Russia.**

Anna*s life has become unbearable, and one day a letter comes
— from Ivan. He also is returning home. Get out, the mother
tells her, get out with the baby. But Anna does not know where
to go. She wanders up the road and sits on a stone, crying, under
the former landowner’s house, which the more energetic younger
women, under Vassilissa’s direction, are making into the childrens’
home.

D 1

Vassilissa, hearing crying, runs down the steps. She knows
the story. But she has a solution. Anna must bear the situation
a few days longer till the home is ready, then she can leave her
baby in it and begin life over again.

The Spring Festival comes. There are swings, women laugh
and fling garlands on the water. The farmer and his wife go out
to the crowds. So does the mistress ; and her child, replica of the
mother, poses in front of the glass and leaves, sneering at Anna.
It is interesting to see this, so true to what a lot of children are,
copies of an adult world, only less powerful, rather than the
innocent little beings most studios make them out to be. Anna,

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, L

afraid to go, plaits her hair and, watches through the window.
Suddenly she sees Ivan and, afraid, runs from him and hides.

But Ivan has lost his sensitiveness in the army. He sees the
baby, rages, joins with the family hurried back to welcome him.
Terrified, Anna runs out and throws herself into the stream.
Vassily first, followed by the others, runs along the bank, but it is
too late. They carry the body home and sit looking at it.

At that moment Vassilissa enters. She wastes no time over
the dead. Where is the living? She looks round the room, walks
over to the baby and picks it up. “ Your father, Ivan, is the
guilty one,** and she leaves them to their raging and reproach
while she herself, with the baby in her arms, walks towards the
childrens* home.

It is the child, and the living, that are important. This is so new
in cinematography. New almost to literature. It is Vassilissa
who has dared to do what she wanted to do, who has emerged
from horror and despair and evil ; Vassilissa with the fundamental
desire to protect the growing thing. You should stay at home,
the man says. And the women who stay at home meet with base-
ness and evil and jealousy and death because they are unable to
protect themselves. Every woman who is economically indepen-
dent makes the acts and the attitude of the father, and in a lesser
degree, of Ivan and Nikolai, less possible. Vassilissa, who had no
child and defied her father, protects all children. The farmer *s
wife, who had a family, attacked the helpless and forgot the baby.
Anna, *who was sensitive and submissive and w’eak, gave in to
village customs and met death.

Over all the world the same things happen, in equal and lesser
degree.

Not until women are able to care for themselves will there be
real progress in development. It may be that husband and wife
will not necessarily both be at work together, but unless the woman
knows that she is able to go out and earn her living, there is
alw^ays risk of tyranny. From the man*s point of view, too, he
should not have to feel that a family or a wife are to be a drag on
him all his days.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

No State should have the right to demand life : military service
for men and child-birth for women should be utterly a voluntary
action. There are many women unfitted psychologically to bear
children or more than one child, and their reaction (often uncon-
scious) affects the baby more than anyone else. And as things are
at present constituted, numbers of women desire children, but
because of environment or circumstance do not marry. Under a
decent system it should be possible for any woman in good physical
health to have a child if she desired, and it should be held equally
wrong for those who did not wish one to have them. And on birth
it would be the rule, and not the exception, to place all children
in a nursery school for the first few years of their life. And I
WTite this from the point of view of the child.

It is this that is so great about The Peasant Women of Riazan.
Priobrashenskaya has seen beyond faces into truth. The farmer is
a tyrant, but he is illiterate and has nothing to break the monotony
of his life but drink or finding a new woman. Ivan is sensitive and
w'eak. When his sensitiveness is rubbed away he becomes a bully
also, blustering to hide his incompetence. Anna is helpless and
kind and meets disaster. The mistress is a heavy, sensuous
animal, but kindly and comic, had not her passions of jealousy
and anger been aroused. It is all lack of education and of intel-
ligent amusement. But Vassilissa, learning and thinking, builds
for a new age.

The Peasant Women seems to me the most moral film I have
ever seen. It has expressed the entire core of village Kfe, the
attitude of gossip and tyranny from the old to the young, that
drives the stronger types to seek the freedom of the towns, all
over the world. Yet a few days ago a cutting reached me from
an English paper saying that Russian films were the dirtiest: the
correspondent had seen, for in one of them a married woman had a
child with her father-in-law. And that very same morning, open-
ing the local paper, there w^as an account of a man who had
violated and then murdered his daughter in a remote Alpine village,
and then escaped to the hills w'hence he was driven by the winter
snows. Another peasant situation repeated, and not in Russia.
When people so blind themselves to what happens in the world

Chen iakotf, dtrcLt'jr (jf Son .is, hiU'.elil.Mi .m ( .j Ji-' • I >.-t .t ‘i’tm l> <> h’ Klil^.^dx’n^k>i^a, ICTif^hn,

,nlm hfii a>td _ in<l iC

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, 1.

one can understand any revolution. But I think there is a
fundamental sanity in the Eng^lish that would see and understand
and acclaim The Peasant Women for the truth and constructiveness
of its lesson.

Unless a copy was preserved in Russia, it is unlikely the picture
can be shown again.

CHAPTER VII.

Sociological Films, II.

Eugenij CherviakofF, the director of His Son {Das Kind des
Anderen), was born in Leningrad and educated in the lycee there.
He is about twenty-eight. He then became an actor and assistant
director under V. Gardin. Those who have seen the film will
remember him as Pushkin, in Tzar and Poet. His Son is
Cherviakoff's first film. It was released in Germany by Derussa
in November, 1928, and an account was given in Close Up in the
issue of that month.

The story is simple. Olga (Anna Sten) walks out of the
maternity hospital with her baby. Her husband, Andrei (G.
Mitschurin), is waiting for her with a sledge. On the staircase she
manages to tell him that the child is not his. And the rest of the
film is concerned with the trouble caused by gossip and interference.
For Andrei belongs to the fire brigade and they live in a huge
communal barracks. Andrei, left to himself, would have rapidly
adjusted himself to the circumstances, for Olga assures fcim she
is seeing the baby’s father no longer. But the women gossip.
They point at the father ; they point at the child. Andrei is driven
by this into fits of unjustifiable jealousy. He worries Olga night
and day to tell him who the father was. And meanwhile the real
father, Grigor (P. Beresof), another fireman, has been trying to
get a glimpse of the baby. He follows Olga down the street.
She takes no notice. Finally he catches up with her, talks to her.
But, with her mind on Andrei, she answers “ whether it were love
or not, now it is over.”

But she returns to find the women in the communal kitchen
pointing at her baby and gossiping about her. One of the women

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, IL

in particular, an aged, thin and sarcastic spinster, is the personifi-
cation of a type everybody has kndwn, who is only happy when
torturing — under the pretence of morality — other people. «

At last Olga tells Andrei, hoping to stop his persistent anger,
who the father is. He rushes off to the sleeping quarters of the
unmarried men, and before Grigor can wake from a heavy sleep
seizes him and would have injured him severely had not the other
firemen prevented it.

Days pass : Andrei takes to drink and neglects his work. Olga,
unable to stand the gossip and suspicion any longer, goes to Grigor.
But for all Grigoris kindness she still remembers Andrei.

Nor can Andrei find peace. He knows he has been wrong.
A child dies in the barracks. The old women who have driven
Olga out help with the funeral. The mother, rigid with grief,
stands staring at the coffin. “ She does not cry, she does not
care,” the old women whisper, and the thin spinster slaps the
hand of the liny sister who has stretched her fingers out to touch
the dead baby. Gossip and ill-natured comment and ignorance,
these are the great foes of the progress of the world.

But the head of the work committee goes to see Olga. Work is
found for her. Her child is put in a nursery. And happiness
begins again, from these two simple steps.

And this is the greatness of His Son. It gets down to sound
psychology and to a constructive programme. The babies are
shown eating, washing themselves, and sleeping in the home during
life dayt under the supervision of a trained nurse. They laugh.
The one just able to lift a big spoon serves the tinier ones with
their food. Olga, too, is not troubled with gossip any more. She
has her work, and her child at night.

But one evening a fire breaks out in the house. Olga, the baby
and Grigor try to escape down the staircase. Half-suffocated
with smoke, Olga drops the baby. Grigor drags her out, half
conscious only, into the street. As the ambulance men lift them
on to stretchers, Andrei, come with the fire brigade, hears her call
for the child. The house threatens to fall, but he plunges in and
at last is able to come to the ambulance with the baby in his arms.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

He gives it to the mother, an/i as the ambulance jolts off the two
men sit looking at Olga and iach other.

The ond is not very convincing; one wonders, even, if the
German is different from the Russian version. The logical finish
would have been earlier, when Olga found work. But it is a
serious and beautiful film with great constructive value. Again,
as in The Women of Riazan, the emphasis is placed on the
child. It is better for the baby to be in a well-lit, airy nursery,
with its mother at work, than in the midst of a family life founded
on dissension. Dissension would never have occurred had it not
been fanned by gossip and spiteful conversation. This is real
morality, and if this reasoning were applied generally half of the
tragedy and unhappiness of life would be prevented.

Anna Sten is better in this film than in the others I have seen
her in, particularly in the opening scenes when she returns home
with the child and when Grigor follows her down the street. It
is a wSovkino film. Yet again there is no reason (there being no
question of politics) why the film could not be generally released
in England.

The theme seems a favorite one with the Russians. No doubt
because it is constantly occurring in the new world after the
Revolution. And they face the matter instead of trying to hide it.
For, in the handbook of the new season's films, a Meschrabpom-
Russ film is announced with the same story, A Human Being is
Born. I have not seen the film, but quote the summary of it from
the book. A type-setter's wife has a baby, but admits* to her
husband it was not his. He decides, however, to forget the matter
and to live with her as before. But local gossip and malice prick
him constantly until he flies into such rages that, in despair, the
wife decides to kill the baby and herself. At the last moment the
man realises his fault and saves them. And from that time on
takes no notice of gossip. This film is directed by Jeliabushky,
with Moskvin and Tichomirova in the chief parts.

E. Cherviakoff (director of His Son) will make, it has been stated,
Boule de Suif (instead of A. Room, as was at first rumored), with
Anna Sten in the chief part, for Derussa.

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, IL

The Yellow Identity Card (Der G^lbe Pass) is a film dealing with
the pre-revolution regulations as toJprostitutes. Part of it is very
fine, but other sequences are not completely convincing. However,
the director of it, F. Ozep, told me he could hardly recognise the
German version, and I have not seen the Russian.

Jacob (I. Kowal-Samborski) returns to his village from military
service. His wife, Maria (Anna Sten), and little daughter are
working in the cornfields. This opening is excellent. One after
the other, a villager recognises him and shouts, till his wife comes
running through the corn and they turn together, rather shyly,
and walk down the path towards their cottage.

The owner of the land is celebrating his daughter’s w'edding.
Jacob and Maria beg for a piece of land. To please the daughter
the petition is granted, but the land proves unfertile.

They struggle with the stones, and in the midst of their labor,
Maria’s second child is born. At about the same time the land-
owner’s daughter has a baby and needs a nurse for it. They
remember Maria. At first Maria refuses to leave her own children,
but when they cannot pay their rent she is obliged to go.

At the daughter’s house in the city, Maria antagonizes the
porter, for she will not let him make love to her. One day a letter
comes for her, but the daughter reproaches her husband (V. Fogel)
for having given it to the nurse, lest it should contain bad
news on account of which they might lose her. In the midst of
their quarrel Maria brings in the letter, she cannot read and begs
them to read it to her. Actually, the letter tells of Jacob’s misery
atid tht^ childrens’ illness, and that he w^ill be turned out of their
home as he cannot pay the rent. But the daughter reads out a
different story, that all is well and that Maria must remain in the
city. ^ She whispers privately to her husband that money must be
sent \o Jacob to keep him in the village.

The husband forgets for several days, and when he does send it
is too late. Jacob has already left, dragging the children with
him. The baby dies on the way.

Meanwhile, the daughter’s husband realises Maria is pretty.
One day he locks the door and in spite of her struggles makes
love to her.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

When Jacob comes to the door the porter, in revenge for Maria’s
refusal to have anything to do with him, explains that she has
not replied to the letters because of her affair with the daughter’s
husband. Jacob, when Maria runs down the stairs, drags the child
away and declares he never wishes to see her again.

The shock prevents Maria being a foster-mother any longer and
she is dismissed. She has no place where she can go and wanders
to a park.

There is a sudden raid, and, having no home, she is arrested
with a number of prostitutes.

All of them are brought before the police ; a motley collection.
Maria has no passport. They hand her one, the yellow identity
card issued to prostitutes. Not knowing what it means she goes
to an employment office.

There she is immediately picked out from the other women by a
plump old lady who wants a nurse for her children. All goes well
till they see her card, when, of course, the old lady has hysterics
and Maria is driven down the steps to fall into the clutches of a
woman who takes her off to a brothel.

The following sequences are the key to the film. No attempt
is made to obscure the reality of the scenes, and the mixture of
gentility and vice becomes overwhelming. Each casual visitor
is shown, psychologically : as they enter, as they leave. Repressed
middle-aged men, drunk young farmers with a little money, fat
women, thin girls, mingle in a large room together. They dance,
they bow and hop ; were it not for the faces they might be^t sor^e
annual picnic outing. And gradually, couple by couple, they dis-
appear up the stairs.

One day a visitor (N. Batalof), sprawled on a bed beside Maria,
recognises her as a fellow villager. He gives her news of Jacob
and later on sends her a letter in which she learns Jacob has been
injured in a quarry accident.

Maria manages to escape from the house. She walks back to
her village. Jacob, who has been unable to walk since the accident,
stands when he sees her and pulls her towards him. And their
fellow villagers leave them alone together,

!i. CHa** eww

THE SOCIOLOGICAL FILM, II.

In many respects The Yellow Identity Card is an extremely
fine film. But it seemed to me that at moments, white was a
little too white and black a little too black. For in the beginning
Maria was shown working in the cornfield, and as both she and
Jacob were young and strong, could they not have got work in
their own village if she had wished not to go to the city as a nurse?
Again, if Maria was so good a servant would her employers not
have made some provision for her family, in order to keep her
mind at rest and therefore, from their point of view, on her work ?
And would she have been quite so innocent as not to know what
a yellow ticket meant? Perhaps there were other explanations
in the Russian version that were omitted from the German, Pos-
sibly they felt it would not be possible to use the extremely realistic
brothel scenes without the long preparation of a somewhat melo-
dramatic story.

Whatever fault there was, was in the scenario, not in the
direction. This showed great power and insight, and whenever
one’s sense of psychological verity was not disturl3ed by the tale,
had the authentic quality of the best Russian cinematography.
The Yellow Identity Card is a Meschrabpom-Russ film, released
in Germany by Derussa. It was show^ing all last autumn in Berlin
in large and small kinos and was very popular.

Mr. Ozep has recently finished directing in a German studio,
for Prometheus, The Living Corpse, from the story by Tolstoy.
The chief part is acted by V, Pudovkin and the film, it is announced,
has* been bought for England.

F. Ozep was born in Moscow and educated there at the lycee.
He then went on to the same University that Pudovkin attended.
When his studies were at an end he took up journalism and
travelled abroad, staying for a time in Switzerland. On his return
to Russia he began to write scenarios and joined the Collectif Russ,
which afterwards became the Meschrabpom-Russ. The Russ was
the only group that kept open right through the Revolution. (He
worked on the scenario of Polikouschka, which dates back to this
period, and which has been shown in London.) Mr. Ozep had
charge of the literary management and wrote or worked on the

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

scenarios for a great numbe* of important films, among them The
Postmaster, •

The «first film he directed was Mess Mend, his second was The
Yellow Identity Card, and his third, the film he has just completed,
The Living Corpse.

Wlitkll 5*'. '^FiIkIMi' J?Vif ir^<_' I I 'T.i’ -i I'ki Jv -.I- ^ ‘iRttVSllM in».l

CHAPTER VIll.

The Wufku.

South of Russia, looking towards Asia across the Black Sea
and extending upwards and west to the Polish boundary, is a
vast stretch of territory — the Ukraine — which has its own studios
and organization, the Wufku, for the making of films.

The climatic conditions of the Ukraine must be excellent for
photography, for it is a flat and rich country, full of corn and sugar
beet fields, pasturage and orchards. There are studios at Odessa
and Yalta, and a third has just been finished at Kiev.

Wufku plan to show 117 Ukrainian, 115 Russian and Georgian,
and 37 foreign films through the Ukraine for the season 1928-1929.
They have also engaged a young girl, N. Tokarska, as camera-
man. This is the first time a woman has been engaged as
cameraman in the U.S.S.R.

Unfortunately, I have only been able to see one Wufku film. Two
Days, though 1 have heard a reliable report of another, Zvenigora,
^d several others have been shown in Germany and Paris.

Two Days was made by Stabavoi, a young Ukrainian director.
We had great difficulty in seeing the picture in Berlin, but were
shown it finally by courtesy of Derussa. It was banned shortly
afterwards by the German censor. The last I heard of it in
Germany was that it was being cut and that they hoped a mutilated
version would be permitted. Mr. Montagu and Mr. Brunei have
a copy in England, and it may be showm in time at one of the Film
Society's afternoon performances. Although it was the most
uncompromising of the Russian films I have seen, it is so remark-
able as a piece of art that this does not seem to matter. And I
do not think the types are exaggerated. I think only they are rare.

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

An account was given by K. ^acpherson in the September Close
Upt 1928^^ so I will only summarize briefly the story of the film.

A wealthy family are leaving their large country house, before
the arrival of the Red Army. This is magnificently done. Maids
an4 the daughters fling unimportant and important things into
ever more suitcases, the owner of the house paces up and down,
whilst the caretaker, an old family servant, buries the plate in the
garden. A motor car is waiting. As the family piles into it, a
heavy suitcase falls on and kills a tiny puppy. The mother of the
puppy whines. “ Bury it.” The old caretaker, as the car leaves,
digs a hole for the animal near the treasure chest. Maids hurry
away into the street with bundles. Then the caretaker locks up
everything very carefully, straightens the disordered rooms,
arranges the cigars in a box neatly, and goes up rather rheu-
matically to his own room, and there happens to take out the
photograph of his own son, with whom he had quarrelled years
before.

At the crowded railway station fear reigns. The young son of
the owner of the house is pressed back into the mass of people,
losing his family, and with them the last train. Alone, obviously
for the first time in his life, he runs frightened and crying through
the streets. And as he reaches the gate of the house the Red
Army begin to ride through the town.

The boy beats on the spikes of the gate. Not until some
minutes are past does the caretaker hear him. The dog in the
garden howls over the dead puppy. There is an overwhelming
sensation of fear. Hurriedly the caretaker drags the boy up to
his tiny attic room and tries to calm him. (The boy’s psychological
reactions are very right. He has probably heard nothing, w^e may
suppose, for years but alarmist stories about the revolutionaries.
He has been thoroughly spoiled and at the same time never allowed
any independence. Now his whole world has dropped away and
he is helpless.)

And at this moment soldiers beat on the gate.

The caretaker goes down. He argues with the soldiers. They
are in rags, most of them, but good tempered. Finally, the gate

100

diic-tloi <)l r7L<i .iiul otboi tilni'*

THE WUFKU

is opened unwillingly. The caretqj<er recognises the leader of the
horsemen is his own son.

An interesting psychological situation arises. The father loves
his son and wishes to tell him that he is sorry for their quarrel.
But at each attempt, some trifle prevents and even makes them
argue and fight again. Old habits break their happiness. For
the father cannot shake off the habits of years. He is horrified
when the soldiers camp in the hall, and open the cupboards
curiously. And the son (whom one feels learnt his first lessons of
rebellion from the indignities which he had watched his father
suffer) cannot understand why the caretaker docs not immediately
see that the revolution is offering him deliverance.

Why can’t his father sleep downstairs instead of in his little top
attic?

Why must he worry if the soldiers do spread their blankets in
the dining room?

And the father is agitated about the boy whom he has hidden
upstairs.

It must have been a conflict familiar to many Russian families,
this tension between the old and the new. Hard for both, because
the old have not the belief in change. They have made their
compromise, and to give up the rigid regulations they are used to,
means to give up their life. And hard also for the young, who
cannot comprehend why people should be slaves to unnecessary and
cruel ideas and who yet love their family sincerely.

In Ae middle of the night the father creeps down a winding
staircase to look at his son asleep.

But the howling of the dog disturbs the sentry. Finally, the
dog, scratches up the earth, and beneath the dead puppy the sentry
finds the treasure. This is seized, of course, for the army war
chest.

Next morning suspicion arises. Particularly when the father
tries to smuggle food upstairs. But he is able to conceal the boy
in a loft, and his own son, relieved at finding no one, asks his
father to forgive him for having suspected him of concealing a
fugitive.

101

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

The Red horsemen ride off.* But according to orders, the son
remains in disguise to find out the movements of the Whites.

The Whites ride into the town, and all smiles and smirks, the
boy (who has followed the son to his hiding place unobserved)
rushes down the steps to greet the officers and denounces the
caretaker’s son.

He leads the soldiers towards the son’s hiding place.

The son is captured. And hanged in the garden.

The father realises at last that he has been indirectly responsible
for his son’s death through his refusal to believe in him and the
ideas for which he was fighting.

The second night he spends in the garden, where he can just
reach the dangling feet of his dead son.

Towards dawn he creeps into the house and locks the doors.
Most of the officers are drunk, the rest are asleep. He sets fire
skilfully to the top rooms and the curtains. Then goes slowly
again towards the garden.

Trapped, the officers try to break out of the flames. But the
doors are solid and the locks will not give. The house crumbles
and fire rages.

As dawn comes the father lies up the road with a bullet through
him. And war rolling across the landscape.

The caretaker is played by F. PL Samytchkovski, and the son
!)y A. E. Minin. The acting of Samytchkovski can be compared
only with that of Baranovskaya in Mother. But one cannot think
of acting in connection with Two Days. One can only tl^ink of
it as a real occurrence.

It is useless saying that such a thing could never have happened.
That people are not so cruel, so merciless. I am afraid they are,
though it is rare that it is carried to such lengths. I do not think;
though, it is confined to any one political class. It arises from
education rather than from politics. If we had the right type of
education we could gradually eliminate cruelty, but as much of our
present system is built up on cruelty — often called discipline —
once barriers are removed things happen such as the action or, at
any rate, the attitude, of the boy in Two Days who betrayed the
man who had saved him.

102

<th Ycai .

THE WUFKU

And here, it seems to me, is one^f the great film problems of
Russia. Two Days deals beautifully with the problem of a father
and son, divided on the question of progress, but loving and
respecting each other in a normal manner. It applies to many
people and to many situations we know. But because it is straight
and is set in the environment of the Revolution it is censored or
forbidden. Sorrell and Son, founded upon an exaggerated father-
son relationship (admissible if its evil were pointed out, but instead
it is held up as moral I), is permitted everywhere and is shown
to thousands. Not only this, but we are asked to accept as a main
and tragic incident the rejection of a boy from school because his
father happened to be a waiter. A school that rejects a boy on
such grounds is not a fit place for any child. But will the film
industry of Russia possess enough integrity to refuse to lower its
standards, so that its films may be shown abroad? One knows
the directors and actors will not consent. But, unhappily, negative
costs money, and so does electricity, A man can write a book or
draw a picture for a few pence worth of materials. But a great
director’s contribution to cinematography may be lost if he be
debarred the opportunity to use raw stock or to burn his lamps.
That is why it is essential at this moment that the artists of Europe,
whatever their political beliefs, should unite to do away with a
censorship that permits Sorrell and Son and forbids Two Days,

Stabavoi has made two other films, not yet shown in Europe,
called Calumny and The Man of the Forest, He is now working
A P^arl of S emir amis, a film which has for subject the story
of the foundation of Odessa.

Among other films now being made in the Ukraine are Inside
the Convent, which deals wdth female monastic life, directed by
rtardine, and The Eve, directed by Grinyeef.

I am indebted to Mr. Macpherson for the following brief review
of Zvenigora, which I was unable to see personally.

Zvenigora was made by Dovenkof, and was remarkable for the
acting of Nicolas Nademsky, a youthful actor who played the part
of a white-haired and white-bearded old man. The story is
fantastic, and blends realism with long digressions into dreams of
Vikings and a ship with treasure. The great fault of Zvenigora

103

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

IS muddle. It is an effusion^df ideas scrambled rather than put
together, and the intertwining of actual event with the mystic,
half-occiflt evocations of the old man were not a unity, nor con-
vincing on either plane. The mystic occupied the greater part of
the film, and can be likened to the spirit of the earlier scenes of
the Student of Prague, or the sequences in Faust where the devil
is summoned to the moor. This feeling was rather the intention
than the effect, for the effect suffered from the curious impetuosity
and muddle which is to be associated far more closely with the
Russia of the past than the Russia of to-day. Zvenigora, whose
story is a series of irrelevant episodes, has at moments true vision,
very much like the earlier writing of Dostoieffsky, where the desire
to express the finer ideas becomes a rush of incoherencies witV
here and there the emergence of something startling or beautiful.
By far the weakest sequence of the film is the long dream in the
middle, in which the Viking figures tramp, as though floating, with
the unfortunate effect of not appearing to float, so that their move-
ments became irritating simply.

There are some charming moments between the old man and
the half idiot boy that follows him, hanging open-mouthed upon
the old man’s stories; there are some lovely countrysides, and
grassy hills. The hills remain as important, for it is w^hile seated
on them, with bramble bushes, and wind in the grass and in the
old man’s hair, that the illusion of magic is most strong.
Zvenigora, more carefully worked out, might have been a film of
great lyric beauty. *

It has not been shown in Germany yet, but has had quite a
success in Russia. A portion of the film was shown this year by
the Cin^ Club de Geneve.

Dovenkof is working at present on Arsenal, which deals wii.h
the events in Kiev in 1917-1918, and has Nademsky in one of the
chief parts.

Vertof, who made Eleven (or The Eleventh Year), has finished
The Man With The Movie Camera,

104

J'Knn 7irn>n\

WulUii t\lin.

hi.'i-iLl l>\ hoHA a sloiv l'\ ^nuLnt

I hill i

CHAPTER IX.

Miscellaneous Films.

Among miscellaneous films I have seen one excellent comic
picture, Moscow That Laughs and Weeps, two “ Westerns,**
The Son of the Mountains and Revolt in Kasan, a dreary recon-
struction drama, The Tsar and the Poet, and I have heard a reliable
account of Protasanof*s The Forty First.

It is rare to find originality in a comic, but Moscow That Laughs
and Weeps is full of old episodes treated in a new and most amusing
manner. It is a Meschrabpom-Russ film directed by Boris Barnet,
with Anna Sten, who will be remembered from her work in His
Son, V. Fogel and J. Kowal-Samborski.

B, V. Barnet was born in 1902. When he had completed his
studies at the Middle School, he studied for some time at the School
of Painting and Sculpture. After the War, Barnet took up boxing
and devoted himself to this sport for some years. In 1921 he
entered the cinema studio of Kuleshof, where he worked as an
actor. His first part was in the picture, Adventures of Mr. West
in the Country of the Bolsheviki. He acted afterwards in the
physical culture film, On the Right Track. In the capacity of
a(jtor, joint manager and joint scenic artist, he took part in the
construction of the film, Mess Mend.

The title of Moscow is impossible. In a Voks handbook I have,
it is entered as The Girl With the Box, This is less clumsy, but
most unoriginal. It was made in 1927 and was released through-
out Germany by Derussa, in 1928.

The Girl With the Box, played by Anna Sten, lives with her
old grandfather in a village some distance from Moscow. She

105

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

travels daily to the city, wheretshe is employed in a hat shop.
The stationmaster (V. Fo^el) is in love with her, to her amuse-
ment, but fier real attention is given to the hats which she trims
and packs into a box to take to town.

The stationmaster wades through the deep snow to meet her.
But she dodges him, and at the precise moment he wants to be
most romantic he slides backwards down a long slippery track
cut from the distant part of the village to the station. This is
really excellent. It is not exaggerated — it just happens. And it
is followed by an effective shot of a tiny black speck of figure
tramping solemnly against white snow piled to white cloud. In
retrospect this beginning is the most effective part of the picture,
because it is founded on everyday events ; the snowbound houses,
the slide, the morning scurry of workers to catch the train. And
the arrival at the station is certainly the best moment in the film.
A number of old peasant women are waiting to go to market.
Fogel is at the ticket window. But he stays to flirt with Anna
Sten so long that when the train comes in there is still an indignant
queue with a few seconds only to get their tickets.

There are more adventures in the train. A gymnastic teacher
(Kowal-Samborski), bound for Moscow, tramples clumsily on the
precious hat box. The train is crowded and, of course, everyone
takes sides, for and against.

And there is trouble in Moscow. The hat shop is kept by a thin
but domineering wife and a small, cunning husband. Naturally,
they are trying to dodge taxes. They are also trying to dbdge
the housing laws, for in order to keep an extra sitting room they
have registered their employee as having a bedroom there. But the
police are suspicious, for whenever they call the girl is out.

And on top of the police, the tax collectors call to inspect the
hats and, of course, the husband does not recognise them and keeps
dragging out caps and bonnets from all possible hiding places.
So the day begins badly for everyone.

Going out into the cold winter evening, the girl finds the
gymnastic teacher has been unable to find a lodging. An idea
occurs to her. They will marry, just in name, and then he can

106

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

have the room to which she is entitled at the hat shop. For she
herself must make the long daily journey to look after her grand-
father. The indignation of the hat shop proprietors •v'hen she
arrives with her husband and claims the room in the middle of a
dinner party can be imagined. They dare not refuse on account
of the law, but everything is stripped out of it, and as by this thne
the last train has gone, she and her husband sleep as best they
can on the cold bare boards.

The following morning she asks for her wages, but is refused
them, and given instead a lottery ticket they believe to be worthless.
She takes this and goes home.

Soon afterwards they hear on the wireless that the ticket they
have given away, is the winning number.

There is a general chase out of Moscow by the hat shop keeper
to try and buy back the ticket for as small an amount as possible,
and by the husband to warn her to keep it. Fogel, very jealous,
joins in the pursuit, knowing nothing of either side, and throws
both of them out into the snow\

There is another rush back to Moscow, where everything is
cleared up and the girl gets the lottery money. But her husband
now (after a fight with Fogel) feels he ought to terminate the
arrangement made to get him a shelter and rushes off to procure
divorce papers. She, however, writes on the form she refuses,
and it ends in a general reconciliation.

There is no reason why this film should be censored : it is utterly
non-political, and as it presents many comic incidents treated in a
fresh, original manner, it ought to run for weeks in the popular
cinemas if released in England. It is full of moments such as the
snowy path, the slide, the struggle for a seat in the train, that
are part of everyday life, but being shown in a Russian unfamiliar
setting, become as new as the strange landscape. The whole
moves with the speed one associates wuth American comic films,
and V. Fogel is particularly good as the provincial, romantic
stationmaster. Possibly variety of experience makes Russian
cinema actors so good ; compare the different parts he has played,
the hunted, half-mad servant in Siihne, the friend in Bed and Sofa,
the gentleman in The Yellow Identity Card, and the bewildered

107

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

stationmaster in Moscow, A ^reat difference from the Hollywood
method of making any actor repeat constantly his first success.

Barnek^has just finished another film, which I have not seen,
called The House in Trubnaya Square, also a Meschrabpom-Russ
production. This includes V. Fogel and N. Batalof again, and
A. AVoizek (who was Fatme in Revolt in Kasan), It is said to be
a satire on the lower middle class life of the occupants of a block
of flats in a city.

Parascha, a peasant girl, goes to Moscow and is employed as a
servant by Golikof, a hair-dresser. She renews her friendship
with a chauffeur, Stephan. One day a play is given, and Golikof,
as a general, is supposed to shoot Stephan, a communist.
Parascha, in her excitement, forgets it is a play, and attacks
Golikof with a stick, in revenge for his supposed attack on her
friend. Golikof angrily dismisses her the next morning.

About the same time, however, the elections are on and one
Parascha is elected delegate. Golikof mistakes the similarity of
name and rushes in search of his servant to take her back wdth
much ceremony to his shop. When he discovers his mistake she
is again dismissed, but this time the Trade Union takes up the
case.

Parascha, however, finds a new place — as wife to Stephan.

Apparently, from the stills, Fogel plays Golikof. It should be
a very amusing film, if it is as good as Moscow That Laughs and
Weeps, Barnet’s films are said to be very popular in Russia. He
made also Moscow in October for the tenth anniversary of the
Revolution. They have more possibility of success than the
American films, as in the midst of some really amusing Hollywood
incident, the director is reminded that certain conventional ideas
must be observed. The Russians, however, can depend on
psychology for their effects, in comedies as well as their more
serious films. It is a great pity if they are still kept from the
English screen, merely because made in Moscow.

I saw The Son of the Mountains {Abrek) in Sw^itzerland, and full
particulars of the film were not given. It was released in Germany
by Prometheus and is a typical “ Western/* chiefly interesting
for the many scenes taken in the Caucasian mountains. English

108

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

people are apt to associate snow \^ith Russia and to forget that
much of the country is Mahomedan and subject to intense heat
rather than to ice. For this reason alone the film is vah^able. It
begins in a village set on a spur of the Caucasus, and one might
almost imagine one was watching a scene from the American film
of the Persian mountains, Grass, The theme is the usual one, of
Russian soldiers oppressing the peasants until a “ Robin Hood
arises, the son of the mountains. It is curious how little folk tales
alter the world over, for most of the Robin Hood incidents are
repeated. As the soldiers ride to the village, he swings into the
town, into the governor’s house. He pretends to be shot, but it is
a bundle of clothes that has fallen over the precipice. Finally, he
gives himself up as a ransom for his village on the promise that
he shall be shot like a warrior. Of course, they take him to be
hanged and, of course, he asks to dance and gets away, though
his friend is killed. He disappears in a cloud of dust — and revenge
— to the hills.

Several children went to this film on my recommendation ana
enjoyed it. But its chief interest in retrospect remains the scenery
and a certain rough, “ cow-boy ” quality of movement.

There could be no possible reason for censoring this film,
particularly as its theme is much the same as that of The Gaucho,
and many other American films that are shown freely.

The Russian title of Revolt in Kasan appears to be Bulat Batir,
It is a Sovkino production, directed by Youri Taritsch, and was
-^released in Germany by Prometheus in the autumn of 1928, under
the title of Brand in Kasan, its original title, Brand in Volga Land,
having been forbidden owing to another firm claiming the Volga
title for their film. The dispute about the title is still unsettled.

The story of the film takes place in the time of Catherine II,
when the Russian governor of Kasan (a large city on the banks
of the Volga) repressed harshly those Tartars who refused to accept
Christianity.

The troops storm a village, where they wound Bulat Batir, kill
his wife and carry off his little son Achmed as a prisoner. Bulat
escapes to the steppes, collects rebels round him and joins

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FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

Pugatscheff, the leader of a peasant movement against Catherine’s
rule.

Meantime, Achmed has been brought up as Russian and has
become a lieutenant in the army. One day, when sent upon an
expedition of destruction to a Tartar village, he intervenes in the
brwtal questioning of a small child. Later that day he is captured
and Fatme, the adopted daughter of Bulat Batir, intercedes for
him on account of his having tried to save the little boy. Achmed,
however, is bound to a tree and a fire is lighted. But the second
son of Bulat, Timur, turns traitor and offers to free Achmed if the
Russians will reward him. They reach Kasan and shortly after-
wards Bulat, betrayed by Timur, falls into Achmed ’s hands. But
Achmed remembers his Tartar ancestry, frees Bulat and goes to
work in Kasan for the freedom of his people. He is betrayed by
'y Timur and saved only by the capture of the city by Pugatscheff
and Bulat. Achmed kills Timur and rides with Fatme, after the
'’Tartar horsemen.

■' The chief merit of this film is the scenery. The photography is
good, three cameramen are mentioned, W. Giber, A. SoJodnikoff
and N. Sokoloff. The moments when Pugatscheff’ s troops cross
the Volga and when the soldiers race up the winding hill to the
castle are particularly beautiful. Tartars riding always seem more
exciting than cowboys, but perhaps this is due to an early
acquaintance with Marco Polo’s travels. The film would be
excellent for a children’s programme, partly because it is the sort
of tale they like, full of escapes and fighting, and also because it
gives interesting shots of a landscape unfamiliar to most English
people. One misses, however, the intensity one is accustomed to
in Russian films. There is not the slightest reason why this film
should not be shown throughout England with a U. certificate;

Bulat was played by W. Jaroslavzeff, Achmed by Ivan Klukvin,
Timur by A. Schukof, and Fatme by Anna Woizik.

Another film directed by Taritsch, The Captain^ s Daughter, also
a Sovkino production, was expected to arrive in Berlin during the
w'inter. This deals also with the same period as the Pugatscheff
story. It is taken from a novel by Pushkin. A rich farmer sends
his son to do his military service, but on his way the boy is caught

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

in a tremendous snowstorm, from which he is rescued by a
mysterious stranger. Scenes fdllow in which the boy, Grinyef,
becomes engaged to Mascha, the daughter of the coipmander of
the tortress where he is stationed. But they are all caught up in
the revolt led by Pugatscheff, who turns out to be the stranger
who had saved Grinyet in the snowstorm. Pugatscheff is beUayed
by his own Cossacks and Grinyef and Mascha escape with difficulty
to their farm,

7 he 7 sar and the Poet, directed by V. Gardin, and founded
upon the life of Pushkin, seemed a very dreary affair. It was
released in Germany by Derussa, and according to the German
trade papers has been bought for America. But it has none of the
qualities of compression, intensity and psychological insight which
one associates with Russian cinematography. Perhaps their
genius is better adapted to deal with machinery and modern prob-
lems than with historical reconstruction. The film was sentimental
and full of a romanticism that has been better done in Hollywood.
It is said to be very popular, and I can only record my opinion
But it is the sort of picture that might so easily be shown in England
and America as an example of Russian methods, while actually
it has far more in common with D. W. Griffith than with the
development that produced Eisenstein and Stabavoi.

Pushkin, for example, is shown playing with his children instead
of going to court. But instead of showing him talking to them
or playing with them, in the way Room might have shown it, with
great emphasis on psychological detail, Pushkin merely buries
his htead in their necks, kisses and hugs them. After hundreds
of feet of this, one was almost sympathetic with the wife when
she went off with a preposterous-looking officer. Then there were
yards of fountains, big fountains, little fountains. Splashing water
evferywhere. And a death scene done in thoroughly conventional
manner and lasting half an hour.

One’s critical sense rebels at judging a director by one picture,
but I feel it is very necessary to warn people who may see The
Tsar and the Poet, because it is a Russian film, that it is not
representative of modern cinematography. But it is interesting to
see it in conjunction with other Russian films and to note that

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FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

the same tendency to sentimentalize and portray emotions by stock
symbols exists in Russia equally as in England. Perhaps V.
Gardin, on^ of the oldest directors in Russia, is better in a less
stylized subject. Kastus Kalinovski, another film directed by him,
is announced on the list for the 1929 season in Berlin. Kastus
Kalintovski, the hero of the film, is the leader of the rebels in the
revolutionary period of 1863. It is a Belgoskino production, and
the chief parts are played by Sofia Magarill, Nicolai Ivanof and
Nikolai Simoneff, and is a film thoroughly disliked in Russia.

But I do not wish to form any definite opinion of V. Gardin ’s
work until I have seen another film. So many things may unite
to make one picture quite unrepresentative of the director who
made it.

I have not seen The Forty First myself, but it is ranked among
the best of the earlier Russian films. No copies were available
in Berlin when I was there, as all copies were in use in the smaller
German cities. It is said to be most popular in Germany.

It is a Meschrabpom-Russ film, directed by Protasanof. It was
released in Germany by Derussa in 1928 and was made in Russia
some time ago, from a story by Lavrenof, a young Russian writer
who himself fought through the Revolution.

Mr. Oswell Blakeston gives a full account of the film in Close Up,
November, 1928, of which the following is a brief summary.

Two companies of soldiers are fighting in the sand. The best
shot of all the revolutionaries is a girl. She fires at the officer
commanding their opponents, “ the forty first.” He is feund,
however, to be only wounded, and they decide to take him to
headquarters. On the way they lose their camels and get short
of water in a sandstorm, and reach a village only after great
privations. The girl and the officer drift into friendship. Finally,
the soldiers embark on a ship, but it is wrecked in a storm an4
the girl and the officer only are able to reach the shore.

They live alone for weeks. The girl loves and is happy, but
the man grows tired of his primitive existence and longs for rescue.
At last they see a sail. But as the boat approaches the girl realises
that the man will leave her at the earliest possible moment. She

112

t < u t! 1>\ V

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

shoots him as the sailors come be<jause “ he was the forty first
to fall to her rifle and the only man she had loved.*’

Protasanof is said to have all the qualities of the grea^ Russian
directors, and two other films directed by him are on the 1929 list
for release in Germany. One is historical, the other a satire.
The scene of the historical film, The White Eagle, is set in 1905.
The governor of a large town is blamed for not adopting sterner
measures towards the strikers. The political police therefore
organize a demonstration and provoke a riot. Many of the workers
are shot. The governor is rewarded with the order of the White
Eagle, but a wave of hatred sweeps through the town. The chief
spy, who had provoked the attack, is discovered. The pofitical
police need him no longer and dismiss him. He appeals to the
governor, who orders him out of the room, and in his anger the
spy shoots the governor dead. This is also a Meschrabpom-Russ
film, with Anna Sten, W. L Katschalof and W. E. Meyerhold.

The second film, Don Diego and Pelagea, is a satire against
red tape. Golovitsch, a stationmaster in a lonely village, spends
his time reading old Spanish romances until fantasy and reality
merge in his mind. One day the villagers surprise him fighting
an imaginary duel. Their laughter makes him so angry he arrests
an old peasant woman, Pelagea, wdio crosses the rail^vay line, in
that moment, at a forbidden place.

Pelagea is sentenced to three months* imprisonment. Her
husband appeals to the authorities in vain. Finally, some young
p, people ,^take up her case, succeed in having her released and in
holding up to ridicule the futility of “ red tape.’*

The chief actors are BIumenthal-Tamarina and M. Sharof.

Those who have seen his films say Protasanof has an intense
intei,»est in humanity as opposed to any set system which .says this
thing or that is right. He uses landscapes to emphasise moods
and has a wide knowledg-e of the psychology of individual types.
He shows the extenuating circumstance, but never forgets the root
of the issue.

Protasanof was also the director of Aelita, a film based partly on
a novel by A. Tolstoy, and which contrasted scenes in the Russia
of 1919-23 vith fantastic effects supposed to be set on Mars. It is

113

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

reported that actors from opposite schools and pupils from the
State School of Cinematography were used in the production, and
that veny interesting artistic effects were achieved. It was a
Meschrabpom-Russ production and was shown some years ago in
Germany and Austria.

Other films on the new Berlin list are New Babylon, a Sovkino
production directed by G. Konsintzof and L. Trauberg, and Assya,
also Sovkino, directed by I. Ivanovsky.

New Babylon is an attempt to show by means of various episodes
the spirit and the temperament of the Paris Commune. New
Babylon is the name of a large departmental store whose owner
is interested, for business reasons, in the continuance of the War.
Paris is shown in the hands of the Commune and during the siege.
The story of a French soldier and of a shop girl who is killed is
interwoven with impressions of the later days of the Commune.
It is said to be a very fine and realistic picture.

L. Trauberg w^as born in Odessa in 1902. In 1921 he organised,
together w'ith Konsintzof, the T.E.K.S., which stands for “ The
Factory of Eccentric Actors.*^ He is a noted scenario writer and
has w^orked hard in the teaching of cinematography.

J. Konsintzof was born in 1905 and trained as a painter. In 1920
he became director of the opera comique in Leningrad and in 1923
began to work with Trauberg, as a director, in films.

They have made the following pictures : The Adventures of
Octiahuna, 1921; The DeviVs Ring, 1925-6; The Cloak (from a
story by Gogol), 1920; Brother, 1926-7, and S.F.D., 1926-7. ,

Assya tells the story of an illegitimate girl brought up as a
bondw^oman. She falls in love wuth Stephan, the stable boy, but
this being discovered, she is sold to a neighbouring farm and the
boy is severely punished. They try to escape together, but are
caught in a snowstorm and only reach Petersburg after much
suffering and many adventures. She finds her father, and on his
recommendation they are freed.

But the chief films for 1929 are Zuchthaus {The Prison),
Prisoners of the Sea, and New Babylon (see above).

Zuchthaus is a Gosvoyenkino film, and shows the struggle of the
political prisoners before the Revolution against the attempt to

114

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

break their spirit by mixing them with the worst types of criminal
and inflicting on them many physical and mental torments. It is
directed by J. Raismann, from a manuscript by S. Erpiolinski.
They have tried to depict not the struggle of one individual, but
the daily life of an entire prison and the struggle and despair of
the prisoners. t

Zuchthaus was shown in Berlin in early February. It is the story
of a prison in Siberia and of the treatment accorded to the political
prisoners. Their lives become so unbearable that Ilya Berz (A.
Schilinsky), one of their number, decides to commit suicide to draw
the attention of the outside world to their plight. He and his
comrades arc saved by the revolution. The photographs are
extremely thoughtful (the cameraman is L. KosmatolT) ; Rais-
mann\s method has been compared by Berlin critics to that of
Dreyer in Joan of Arc, though opinions differ as to the quality of
the film. The prevailing opinion seems to be that he is a director
of great ability and promise.

I saw a collection of stills in Berlin that were amazing and bore
out the suggestion made that it was a film able to rank among
the best work of Russian cinematography. It has been released in
Germany by Derussa.

Prisoners of the Sea is also a Gosvoyenkino film, with Derussa
release, directed by M. Werner, The German title is Gefangene
des Meeres, The story of this begins in 1919, when Lehr, a
commander in the Red Army, is left behind in a town by accident
and arrested by the Whites. While in prison he makes friends
‘'with a "Sailor, Filipoff, who hands over to him important papers.
These are, however, discovered, and both men are condemned to
death. They are able to escape, however, severally, but do not
meet for eight years, w^hen Filipoff is appointed as officer to a
submarine commanded by Lehr. They are suspicious of one
another. One day the submarine follows a suspicious ship, but
through a sailor’s carelessness water forces its way into the hold
and the submarine sinks. The crew endure hours of agony, but
as hope is at an end a diver makes his way to the bottom of the
sea and a CTane is enabled thereby to pull the submarine to the
surface. When the diver throws back his helmet Filipoff is

115

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

astonished and ashamed to see the face of Lehr, whom he had
mistrusted.

The cjlpief parts are played by O. Knipper-Tschechova, N.
Kutusof, I. Strauch and A. Kramof.

As between a hundred and a hundred and fifty full leng-th films
ar« turned out anually in the various studios of U.S.S.R., exclusive
of educational and short pictures, and as only about twenty of these
are available abroad, and then chiefly in Germany only, it is impos-
sible to ^erive more than an outline of what may be expected in the
1929 season. Eng-land, particularly, is faced with a difficult task
when dealing*: with the Russian cinema. For should films be freely
released in London, the developments of ten years would have to
be filliped down with all the new productions ; rather like asking*
someone to read all the Elizabethan writers, including* Shakespeare,
in three months, in haphazard order, and form a critical judgement
upon it. For up to date of publication of this book no modern
Russian films have been shown in London except Mother, and The
End of St, Petersburf!:, for one performance each at the Film
Society, and Bed and Sofa, which is announced for a forthcoming
programme there.

We have much to make up in comparison with France, Germany,
Belgium and Switzerland. It is to be hoped that united protest
by English desirous of intellectual liberty will remove the barrier
to our cinematographic development and that we shall be able to
study the new Russian films as they appear.

As this book was already in the press, I received from Moscow ,
the following short notices of Poselsky and Taritsch.

Yakov Mikhailovitch Poselsky w^as born in the year 1892. He
received higher education and has been working at cinematography
since 1914. He began to work independently in 1916. He made
a number of pictures, including The Disused Nest, Ganousya (after
Sienkievitch), etc.

After the February Revolution he worked at Odessa on the film,
The Life and Death of Lieutenant Schmidt, From 1919 to 1925
he made, in Moscow, Workers, Arise! In Defence of the Peasant,
The Affair of the Horse-Doctor, Matof, and other pictures. He
made as well for Meschrabpom (International Workers* Aid) the

116

MISCELLANEOUS FILMS

cultural films, To All Workers at AJi Times (on the metric system)
and The China and Glass Industry,

Recently he has been working for Sovkino on cultural ’ftlms and
has made The Food Problem, Ten Years of Soviet Medicine and the
Workers' Spartakiada, Several photographs from the Spariaktada
have appeared in Close Up and many comments have been made*ion
their extreme beauty.

He is now at work on an educational film, The Hygiene of
Women, and states ; “ 1 am trying to find the most simple and
convincing forms of screen treatment of the theme, taking into
account the psychological peculiarities of the proletariat spectator.''

It is a pity that some of the educational films, and particularly
the Workers' Spartakiada, cannot be shown in England, as they
sound just the type of picture to be most popular wdth an English
audience.

Youri Viktorovitch Taritsch (who directed Revolt in Kasan) was
born in 1886. Higher education.

He worked in the Red Cross division at the time of the Japanese
War. He then helped in the organization of the military revolu-
tion. Prison and exile followed, with six years of acting in the
provinces. In 1914 he composed the scenario for Tragedy of the
Nabatof Family, directed by Libkin. The World War and the
Revolution found him again an actor in Moscow, but he left
the theatre for the kino. In 1919 he w^orked in the Taldikin
pictures, Five Storeys, etc. He began to w'ork seriously at
, cinematography in the winter of 1923, when he wrote the scenario
for The Band of Father Knish, directed by A. Razoumni for the
Gos-Kino.

The Gos-Kino commissioned him in 1924-25 to prepare a large
number of scenarios : — Enemies, A Black Busmess (Wolves),
Moroka, Lenin Junkers, Abrek (The Son of the Mountains), The
Swineherd, Grishka, and The First Fires, In the capacity of joint
manager with E. A. Ivanof-Barkhof, he helped to make Moroka
and First Fires, His best work is Ivan the Terrible.

Of the wq^nen directors, Esther Shoub is one of the most noted
and has made The Fall of the Dynasty of the Romanofs, The Great
Road, and The Russia of Nicolas II, and Leo Tolstoy. All these

117

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

films were based on materi^ furnished by historical and kino
documents. She is now working on a film to demonstrate current
social e>»ents.

It would be possible to extend this list of directors and films
indefinitely, but it is not possible to write critically of pictures there
has been no opportunity to see. The Siberian Kino production
company, for instance, announce ten full-length films, twelve
documents and ten culture films for 1929, and the Gosvoyenkino,
which specialises in preparing films primarily for the Red Army,
announced in various papers recently that they had the following
films in production : The War Secret, Discipline, Commander of
the Red Army, The Melody in the Civil War, The Woman in the
Civil War, and Party Followers and the Volga. They are also
making the cultural films, Flight of Time, Instruction of the
Infantry, Target Practice of a Division, Radio in the War and
Cavalry, while E. Jakushkin is making The Imperial War from
topicals, for the fifteenth anniversary of the World War. This
should be very interesting.

I remember the last lime I was in the Handelsvertretung in
Berlin 1 waited in a room piled to the ceiling with films. I dared
not ask too greedily to have them projected. And among so many
important ones, which should one choose? Every time a list of
new pictures is printed the situation is repeated. There is no
chance of keeping up with so swift a film development.

118

CHAPTER X.

Educational Films.

When I was fifteen I was sent suddenly to an English boarding
school. Probably if I had not gone there I should never have
written this book. Because I had naturally a placid disposition and
a mania for historical research, and left alone I should have drifted
into a library to write elaborate articles on why Middle Minoan II
ought to be classified as Middle Minoan I b. But having spent
two years in the rigid atmosphere of an English scholastic estab-
lishment, I discovered thiough sharp practical experience that it
was useless believing established rules and theories because they
were almost always wrong.

The thing I came up against first was waste. Waste of money
and material. Pupils were sent at eight and left at eighteen
utterly unprepared for business, marriage or leisure. I used to
plan through many inactive hours just how I could have increased
a hundred-fold the efficiency of the school. But I should have
had t(J scrap first the entire curriculum, most of the teachers and
all the favourite phrases doled out at each morning lecture, and of
which the most repeated ran : —

, “ You are sent to school to learn to live.”

" Games promote good will and a community spirit.”

To Learn to Live. Who could find fault with the phrase? But
actually the supervision was so strict that for months on end the
pupils were never left alone, so that if by some extraordinary cir-
cumstance, say half-term, an hour of leisure arose, they did not
know wh^o do with it. They had no knowledge as to how they
were born, except wild stories culled from illicit sources. Marriage

119

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

was a matter for gig:gles, or if thought of seriously, as au escape
from parental discipline. AltHbugh some knew they would have
to earn tfjeir living they had no idea of what they wanted to do,
what positions were open to them, nor was any attempt made to
discover their vocational aptitudes. It was pointed out to them
me^;ely that in later life they must go to church regularly, obey
their parents and never go out alone with a boy.

Of the relationship of a citizen to the state they were taught
nothing. They worked eight hours a day — at totally unrelated
scraps of knowledge. For example : they specialised on the Wars
of the Roses, but there was no modern history taught. The canal
system of England was studied in detail, but they could not have
written dowm the five chief cities in America. They knew obscure
points of Elizabethan grammar, but they did not know who
Aeschylus was nor the name of a single modern author. They
worked tw^o hours daily at a foreign language, but it was taught
in so meaningless a manner that the class resembled a band of
Eskimos wondering if that queer noise in the wnnd was a wireless
signal, an approaching snowstorm or the growd of a hungry bear.
None were capable of writing an elementary business letter.

As for games promoting a community spirit, they resulted
actually in selfishness and favoritism. It was the history of
imperialism on a small scale over again. Forty years ago it was
a great step forward to substitute games in the open air for
embroidering indoors. Now they have become a question of
politics — could this pupil or that obtain the desired position ; with
those few favored by authority resisting any attempt to up?iet the
system which would cause them to lose places painfully acquired.
It is also a rather infantile confusion of idea that because a number
of people join together in a game that a community feeling is
established. Actually it may often mean mob-tyranny and mob-
repression. True feeling for a community comes from absolute
freedom — it is achieved in the group of children w'ho spontaneously
associate together in some of the new experimental schools for
study. It does not come from forcing a couple of dozen people
on to a field because they are afraid otherwise that they will lose
praise, or esteem, or popularity.

120

EDUCATIONAL FILMS

But \\hat has all this got to do with Russian educational films?

It has this, that 1 learnt from practical experience that things
change (though teachers often do not !), and that the Reforms of
yesterday may become the fetters of to-day. Also, though 1 know
this will shock many people, that 1 believe education will make its
greatest stride forward when the personal element is negated in
favour of the use of the machine.

1 have taught myself and I have received many lessons. The
finest type of teacher is possibly better than a machine, but I have
only encountered two or three in a rather wide experience and these
had no certificates, so would not have been eligible for schools.
But a child’s mind is very sensitive, and an uninterested or a
stupid instructor may blight a subject forever in a single morning.
Or the teaching may be given, owing to some national or
psychological prejudice, in a distorted manner. Awkward events
may be entirely omitted. Then the level of instruction may vary
enormously in different schools. Do many English people ever
consider, tor instance, that in a great number of elementary schools
most classes contain forty, and some contain more than fifty
children, and that sometimes two classes go on at once in the
same schoolroom? Consider how difficult it is to keep three or
four children quiet and think how far it is possible for one person
to take the psychological differences of forty into account. The
only thing possible is army discipline, and army discipline is not
education. The only chance of higher education for thousands of
children depends upon success in a difficult examination taken at
the aje of eleven.

So I believe that if the best minds in every country could be
collected together and a series of “ fool-proof text books
pr^ared, rather on the lines of the Dalton assignments, together
with films (silent ones and talkies), and supplemented by wireless
lectures, it would be possible to make the most modern develop-
ments accessible not to a few but to all children, and lest it should
be said that such a scheme would increase unemployment, it can
be pointedout that teachers would still be necessary, to supervise,
run the prJjjector, hear the mechanical drill some subjects exact,
and to explain how a reference library should be used. But the

121

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

actual teaching would be trans^rred from them to the screen and
to text books appealing directly to the children.

Again, j^vhat has this got to do with Russian educational films?

Russia has made more experiments with the educational use of
the cinema than any other nation. It was said that in 1914 only
twenty-three out of every hundred people in Siberia could read and
write, and that after the Revolution eighteen million of the populace
were illiterate. But the Russians realise that progress depends on
education, and have therefore made great use of the travelling
cinema and of the educational film. According to the Voks hand-
book, travelling cinemas increased from 976 in 1925 to 1,824 in
1928. Each of these travelling cinemas covers an itinerary
monthly of about twenty villages. Once the route is finished they
stock up with fresh films and begin over again. The price fixed
for peasants is from five to ten kopecks a performance, and in very
poor villages they are admitted free. The films are delivered to
the travelling cinemas at a reduced price rated according to the
district.

But, it may be argued, the cinema is used extensively in America
and France in schools. An experiment has just been made, for
instance, in the States, in which two groups, each of several
thousand children, selected by means of school records, intelligence
tests and other data, so that each group contained children at the
same stage of development, were taught, one with the aid of the
cinema and one without, over a period of months. The group
that were shown films during the lessons rated 15 per cent, higher
in history and 33 per cent, higher in geography than the^group
taught by ordinary methods. But, in spite of the better materials
available in America, their films are many of them not so advanced
educationally as those prepared in Russia.

American films are tied to a tradition. That is, nothing must be
shown there that is linked to the vital facts of existence, or if these
are mentioned they must be rigidly in accordance with an obsolete
hypocritical tradition. Or again, the newest developments in
medicine and often science are not shown, because the trend there
is against the popularization of science. In fact, it hSs been said
that the doctor in America has taken the place of the priest. And

EDUCATIONAL FILMS

older people often resent having: modern investigations made
known to them. But in Russia everything is begun, if possible,
from a fundamental basis — ^birth, death, actual events o^, life — and,
as far as possible, all medical and scientific knowledge is presented
in the films so that everyone who wishes may keep in touch with
new discoveries. •

And that is what education should be. The capacity to profit
by what is ever being discovered. The ability also to discriminate.
Every intelligent citizen ought to be able in minor matters to be
his own doctor, lawyer and adviser, and to know at about what
point he should pass to a specialist in the subject. But there,
again, little can be done until the top heavy weight of knowledge
no longer required has been removed from various curriculums. I
remember a young doctor, for instance, who told me that all the
knowledge really of use in modern medicine was crammed into six
months of the medical course. The remaining years were spent
learning subjects in detail that had little or no link with medicine
as it is to-day, while many important discoveries had to be omitted
from the programme on account of lack of time. But to a large
extent the people who set the courses do not believe in modern
developments themselves, and without a certificate no one can
practise. It is the same with law and the same with most trades,
even including that of packing boxes of chocolates, for in the
experiments recorded by Professor Pear, it was found that by
means of special training a novice could learn to pack them better
and more quickly in four days than someone who had been at the
work, according to the old methods, for six months.

It is to be hoped that Russia, who was able to scrap all old
methods and begin from the beginning, will bear these facts in
mind.

Russian educational films are divided into several classes.
There are the geographic and ethnographic films, chief of which
are : —

The Country of Tchuvashia.

Pamir.

White Russia,

133

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

To the Shores of Ijie Arctic Ocean.

The Krassin Rescue Expedition.

There a^e the serious scientific films, of which the most important
are : —

Mechanics of the Brain.

Fatigue and the Struggle Against It.

Radio.

The Riddle of Life.

Problems of Nutrition.

There are films dealing with sociological problems : —

The Expiation.

The Abortion.

The Truth of Life.

The Prostitute.

And there are films dealing with the problems of labor or the
management of large works, such as : —

Naphtha.

The Choice of a Profession.

The Volkhof Plant.

The Dnepro Plant.

Besides these and many other films of the same nature, the
historical films based on the story of Russian development for the
past hundred years have all educational value.

1 have dealt elsewhere with Mechanics of the Brain. I saw in
Berlin, by courtesy of the Russian Handelsvertretung, FatigiLe and
the Struggle Against It. This showed in detail some of the well-
known experiments in this direction, particularly the record of
typing, showing the gradual slackening of speed and increased
incidence of mistakes as the day went on. There were also some
interesting photographs of a man taking bricks to the top of a
high building. Beginning with a full load early in the morning,
the bricks gradually decreased in number till the noon rest hour,
mounted immediately afterwards only to decrease, at first /suddenly,
and afterwards in a gradual curve till work ended. TSfese records
should be much more used than they are, by and for workers;

124

EDUCATIONAL FILMS

because they prove indisputably that more work can be accom-
plished in several short stretches* than in one long continuous
period. It is time that the Victorian idea (also due, surely, to some
infantile confusion of length with result) W'as done aw^ay with from
education and business. I have noted carefully from personal
experience in trying to learn various languages that I do not react
to unfamiliar sounds after thirty minutes. But it is impossible to
persuade teachers, as a rule, of that fact. They are persuaded
there is more virtue in an hour. So with w'Ork ; there should be
more opportunity for change than there is commonly, and, when
possible, work should be considered rather by results than fixed
hours.

I have not seem the film of the Krassin rescue expedition, released
recently in Berlin by Prometheus under the title of Das Weisse
Geheitmiis, but I have seen many photographs and heard from
reliable sources that it is one of the finest Arctic films yet made.
And the Arctic has its photographic dangers : I remember seeing a
short film recently which was full of shots resembling the badly
print e^d blocks in a geography primer. But it is easy to see from
the Krassin stills that they have really got the danger and adventure
and beauty of iceberg and snow waste into the picture.

It may be convenient to mention here, although it is not strictly
an educational film, The Documrnt of Shanp^hai, directed by Y. M.
Rliokh. Certain sections of this film, particularly those showing
the crowds, were extremely interesting. But this was (and it is
the only Russian film I have seen that w^as) definitely propagandistic
in the* wrong sense of the term. For while I imagine all decent
English people agree that the scale of life and rate of payment of
the Chinese laborers is shocking, there was no attempt made in
th(; film to show any constructive principles by which it could be
improved. We were merely shown shots of people bathing and
dancing, followed by a sub-title that this wms Western civilization.
This is just as absurd as the Times critic who found Storm Over
Asia ridiculous.

Western civilization has given the world a great many desirable
things — agiicultural machinery, machinery of all kinds designed to
al>oli.sh or lighten labor as bad as that depicted in the film with

125

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

the Chinese workers; it has given, moreover, the modern con-
ception of education and humra rights. The East tends, on the
whole, to accept autocracy willingly. And probably the earliest
traders fi^om Europe to China paved the way for the present
development of the desire of the East also, for universal betterment.
Ag£^in, it is partly the duty of the West to give to the East, fon
if the West develops and the East remains in a state of stagnation
and bondage, the result of over balance would not be pleasant.

There were, however, some scenes shown of the shooting of some
rebels by soldiers, that were so degrading and brutal that one does
not wonder that the cameraman afterwards forgot all measure.

But one does feel that something constructive was lacking from
what was in places an extremely interesting “ document.’*

Dziga Vertof was born in 1896. He completed his studies at
the secondary school, but w’ar service prevented him from finishing
his University course.

Vertof works only with the news of the day ; with real material,
and was the first to inaugurate this kind of work. He has directed
Kino of the Week, about forty numbers, and The Conflict Under
Tsaritsin, For the October anniversary, Vertof and Savilief
produced the chronicle. Anniversary of the October Revolution.
This was followed by the Party Trip of the AlURussian Executive
Committee (in connection with the agitation on behalf of trains
and steamers) and the History of the Civil War,

During the Civil War he worked with the cameraman, Yermolof,
in Kozhevnikof’s army as director of war pictures. Tbon he
organised the Kino-department with Lemberg, at the All-Russian
Central Executive Committee. For about tw^o years he worked
on the organisation and equipment of Kino-transport, Kino-trucks,
and steamer-Kinos. In 1922 he conducted a cinema campaign
for the fight against the famine. Then he worked as manager of
the Kino-chronicle, V.F.K.O., and produced Kino^Truth, At the
end of 1919 he organised the group Kinokof. During the whole
course of his work twenty-three numbers of Kino-Truth were
issued, with a few" scientific chronicles and the first s|^ifes of The
Kino-Eye,

126

EDUCATIONAL FILMS

His work includes ; A Glance oj the Kino-Eye over U.S.S,R,
Export and Import of the State Trading Department, The Moscow
Soviet, A Sixth Part of the World, Eleven (or The Elevejith Year),
and his latest work, The Man with the Movie Camera,

One becomes resentful, reading these names, that the films are
not available in England. Surely the actual pictures of the Revo-
lution and the film made for the October anniversary must be
among the most interesting chronicles of the world. For what
actually happens is always more fascinating than what might
happen ; I am always sad, personally, when the news reel is over,
and it would help one to form a more accurate estimate of Russia
if these actual shots of its history could be projected in England.

137

CHAPTER XI.

Fn.M Problems of Soviet Russia.

There are hundreds of films in Russia, and most of them are of
the same hiq*h standard as those I have described. Russians have
said that some of the best films they make are never exported
abroad. But the industry is faced with many problems, chief of
which are the following* : How lonir can Russia eo on producing:
films unless foreigfn markets are open to her ; if the standards of
production be lowered to meet the wishes of foreign buyers will
the films not lose their character, and be unable to compete with
other pictures; is there a stroner enoutrh body of artistic criticism
to insist that Russian films be shown abroad in an intact form ; is
it possible for Russia to turn out works of g-enius yearly or will
the leyel drop of itself, through the using up of creative forces?

To recapitulate : films cost money. They need not cost the
vast amounts expended on them in Hollywood, where (as people
who have worked there have graphically described to me), in a case
of doubt, the more expensive way, rather than the best, is cjiosen.
Still, a full-length picture cannot be made for nothing. Pan-
chromatic stock costs four pounds for four hundred feet, and any-
where from ten thousand feet upwards is required to make a
picture, say, of five thousand. This can be doubled if, as is usual,
a second negative is required. Then there is the developing and
printing. A positive is worth about fifty pounds for the sheer
cost of making the print. It cannot be used indefinitely, as it is
bound to get slightly scratched and worn each time it is put through
the projector.

At first Russia was totally dependent for her supplieis of cameras,
lamps and raw stock on imports, but she is now endeavouring to

128

Trom .1 !< H - a nt \ Mc'Oli

ditecttJ !. |» li ibiJsli’a \ I ai'i 'tmro'. 4 .

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

manufacture film in the country But the cost of tlie initial

factories must have been heavy.

It is true that the number ot cinemas in Russia increaseiannually.
The numbers are g'iven variously in different i)ooks, but they
amount to many thousands. An exact figure is probably not
obtainable, for there are the visiting- cinemas, already described,
that go from village to village, the kinos in the towns and those
used in the instruction of the Red Army. But the prices of
admission arc low and the cost of transit heavy. Also the Russian
(Government have consistently and constantly spent money on films
for educational purposes. It is probable that in a few years time
they can afford, like Japan, to disregard outside markets com-
pletely if they wish, as Russia becomes more developed,
agriculturally and otherwise. But at the moment a sale of films
aliroad would undoubtedly be advantageous to them.

(Jernrany (and to lesser extent), Austria and Switzerland have
shown Russian films steadily lor years. And I repeat without any
resulting riot of the population. Russia and America have also
agreed to a fixed exchange of pictures. A certain number oi
American films have been bought by Russia since 1921. Last year
it was also stated that they had taken some British pictures.

We have not so far shown any new Russian films freely in return.
\'el 1 believe that the Englisli would most respond, of all nations,
to Russian cinematograpliy. For they portray what I still try to
believe we possess, abstract justice and ability for effort, struggle
and adventure.

(3n t^ie other hand, if Russian films are to be shown freely abroad,
will it not have a deteriorating effect upon their work? The
Germans say it wall. Several w^ell-known German directors and
critics said to me last year : “ Our alliance with the English film
world has set us back five years.’* And when I saw tlie new
German productions I realised it had. It did not soothe my feel-
ings, either, to read shortly afterwards in an English trade paper
that since the Germans had adapted tliemselvcs to the English way
of thinking, their films were becoming popular. How many people
r(‘alise the figJit that a handful of Germans are putting up in their
country to try and save the artistic freedom of the German film?

T29

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

They are pricked and persecuted in every possible and triflings
manner. They are not allowed to choose their own casts, nor often
their ow^nif earner amen. Scenes, sometimes reels, are cut out of the
finished films and scenarios deliberately altered. Yet there are
several directors able to turn out films of the highest Russian
standard if allowed. The beginning of Freie Fahrt (directed by
E. Metzner) was as good as any Sovkino production.

Russian films, then, will most probably deteriorate if shown
freely in England, although, as their general standard is so much
liigher, they will probably always be interesting.

Why must they drop at all?

There are four points to be considered in answer to that question :
censorship, the popular press, timid renters and untrained
audiences.

Consider the press first. In a newspaper office it is a question
of wTite what you are told or lose your job. And there are generally
plenty of good reasons why you dont want to lose your job. But
every newspaper has a politiciil policy and everything, including
book and film reviews, is influenced thereby. I know of one case
where strict orders were given to slam a particular book of poetry
because the author was the “ wrong ’’ side of politics. It was
nothing to do with Russia and the verses (they were bad) were about
lambs and nymphs and spring, so it did not matter. But that is
the attitude Russian films must meet.

If the policy of the paper is against the resumption of trade with
Russia, what do you think w^ould happen to someone who d^red to
write favorably of Ilis Son or Mother? There are a few papers in
England (mainly provincial ones) where they insist upon artistic
matters being kept free from politics, but there are not many of
them. It may be argued that the tradition of English criticism
is always to be* a score of years behind the times (Keats, Byron,
Swinburne, Hardy, etc.), but on the other hand people, if they
read books at all, fifty years ago were usually qualified to a certain
extent to form an independent opinion. Reviews might influence,
but there were safeguards. Now, however, with many readers but
few scholars (thanks to our educational system) pe-^ple are fond
of repeating potted phrases out of papers. There are still too many

130 ’

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

people in England who, because they see a thing in print, believe
it must be true. And they have an appalling unwillingness to track
a thing to its source.

Then, most of the film critics of the various daily, -weekly or
monthly journals have come to cinematography via dramatic
criticism. And if ever there were a gulf between two arts it is
between the theatre and the cinema. The cinema depends upon
reality ; the theatre upon exaggeration. (I remember seeing once
what was merely a photographed play. The hero, abandoned by
the heroine, decided in the best stage manner to commit suicide.
This was too much for the Berlin audience. They laughed, they
whistled, they shouted advice, “ YouMl forget her in a week,”
“ Try a drink,” and, finally, as the hero clasped his brow and
wriggled, an old gentleman moaned mockingly, ” Too bad, so
young.” It was one of the most enjoyable evenings I have spent,
because it proved there were people who were not going to pay
to see stupidities any longer.) The excellence of a play is defect in
a film. Yet many critics either search for the same qualities that
they were accustomed to look for in the drama or have a slightly
condescending air towards that popular pastime, the movies.
There is, for example, a marvellous phrase of Mr. Ashley Dukes,
quoted in The (Aiicma for February 4th: ” He did not believe
that anyone disliked the film as an art-form more than he did, but
it had to be recognised that it was an art-form.”

What we need is not someone with an inferiority complex, but
someone who will say that the public is being given trash when
therrf is art that could be provided for it. W'ords are not much
good to describe a film. For it is not a play, it is rhythm, and
movement, and photography, and cinema-acting, which is utterly
r^ov<.d from theatre-acting, and it needs to be seen, not described.
Vet many critics make no effort to see pictures that could give
them a standard of criticism. There are some that do. These
spend their holidays in Berlin and Paris seeing what has been done
in cinematography abroad, but they have to do so at their own
expense, and many newspapers are unwilling to give them much
space for their criticisms because the films are unlikely to come to
England.

131

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

And then we have no trained jiudiences. In a small Swiss town
at the foot of the mountains, the local cinemas showed in the course
of three four months such a varied programme of the world
best and worst films as Mother, Son of the Mountains, The Circus,
Belphegor, Prey of the Wind, Prince of Adventurers, Wolf's
Clotliing, The Little Chocolate Girl, Messalina, Chang, The
Violinist of Florence, The Spy, and a quite epic document in which
the heroine plunged into the snow to save her old mother and her
old home, descended on a sledge with a bundle of blankets and a
chimney, crashed through a circus tent at the bottom of the snowy
hill and therelorc became a famous dancer, turned her mother out
into the gutter accidently, where the old dame fainted grabbing at
an apple, and was finally reconciled to her fiance in an old cab !
Yes, this was sandwiched between Mother and Rene Clair’s Prey
of the Wind, and the same people went to them all.

But in England most of the films shown are of one monotonous
level. The result is that an Englishman bases his judgment on a
standard that was passed abroad, five years ago. This, of course,
is to the advantage of the American producer, who fears Continental
competition. Already the market in France and Germany has been
curtailed, and for that reason the American “ fan ” and trade press
carry on a constant campaign to discredit Continental films, and
this is reflected over here.

The problem of the timid renter is part of the problem of the
untrained audience. Once let enough people demand a film or
condemn another and the manager of the cinema will adjust his
programmes. The Avenue Pavilion has been very successful. It
is really the question of what you, the spectator, are willing to do
for the screen, for the cinema is an active, and not a passive, art.

The chief barrier in England, however, is the censorship/ whith
in turn has “ tied up ” with the customs duties. A copy' of a
film may have to pay in duty anywhere from fifty to two hundred
pounds, according to length and whether negative or positive only
is imported. Naturally, no merchant is going to import a foreign
film unless he is sure of its enjoying a long run. This is equally
a barrier to the artistic films of the young French rnd German
producers as to the Russian. It has been suggested in Close Up

132

FILM PROBLEMS OF SOVIET RUSSIA

that this difficulty could be met by instituting another letter, other
than A or IJ, for a separate divijSon of artistic or cultural films.
These would be censored by a board composed of artists and
scientists. Films so censored would be admitted to England for a
limited number of performances at a less high rate of duty.

With regard to the censorship, 1 have only to refer readers to
the censorship regulations themselves (an abstract of them was
printed in Close Up for February, 1929). It will be noted that
serious treatment of any problem is forbidden and a premium put
upon vulgarity. So, next time you see a vulgar film don’t blame
Hollywood, blame the censor. One does wonder, however, how a
recent popular success got by that incest barrier. Presumably it
w'as because it was not treated in a serious manner.

The Russians have done so many apparently impossible things
that even if foreign markets were closed to them they would no
doubt^continue to turn out excellent films. And while the standard
of production may slacken in time, it is doubtful whether it has
even yet reachf^d its highest point of development.

For the moment the battle is to the spectator. Is he willing to
allow a handful of individuals to deny him the intellectual liberty
common to the Continent? If not, it is for him to figdit the matter,
by letter, by protest and by word of mouth. Don’t “ See England
First,” but make for the Ursulines, the Ving't Huit or Berlin next
holiday. Judge for yourself what the censor considers unfitted for
you. Then come back and decide whether this humiliating position
accords with the traditions of England, which they proclaim they
are peeping in surety.

SUGGESTIONS

France . — Russian films are seldom shown except in a mutilated
form, unless by private societies. Interesting and unusual
films, however, are shown daily at the Studio des Ursulines,
Studio 28, Vieux Colombier, Tribune Libre du Cinema,
Cind Latin and Salle des Agriculteurs. Fare to Paris and
costs there arc too well known, or can be so easily found
out, that they need not be listed here.

Germany . — Fares via the Hook of Holland, the quickest route,
vary from about five pounds fifteen second to nearly
eight pounds first-class. Much the easier way is to take a
Hamburg-Amerika liner from Southampton to Hamburg,
or a Norddeutscher Lloyd from (usually) Plymouth to
Bremen. The voyage along the coast of England and past
Heligoland is very interesting, and takes about thirty-six
hours. Fare, five pounds first-class or about three fifteen
second, including everything. Railway fares from Ham-
burg to Berlin vary from about 16s. to 30s., according to
class travelled. The steamers are so large sea-sickness need
not be feared. Hotel costs in Berlin are about the same as
in London, but there are many inexpensive pensions. One
warning : all the life and big kinos of Berlin centre am -Zoo,
near the Zoological Gardens, and about twenty minutes’
ride from the Unter den Linden. Should difficulty be
experienced in finding out where films are showing, men-
tioned as having a German release, enquire at Derussa,
Friedrichstr. 8, or Prometheus (quite near), Hedemannstr.
21. They would no doubt inform the traveller if the film
was showing in a small outlying kino, Shq/id a film be

l.‘)4

SUGGESTIONS

privately projected, remember it is usual to tip the projec-
tionist. It is said to be possible to get to Germany very
cheaply on small cargo boats. Most Germans speak a little
English and the officials are helpful to the travelled.

Switzerland . — Russian films released in Germany are often, but
not always, shown in Switzerland. Three or four might
be showing in successive wrecks and then months might pass
before any were available. The programmes in the
large towns, however, are often very good. The Cin^ Club
de Geneve gives interesting seances each season.

Belgium . — There are several excellent societies for the showing of
unusual (including Russian) films, notably the Cin^ Club
(rOstendc. Varictes has also formed for members only a
gluh named Lever House at Brussels.

Holland . — ^The Film Liga of Amsterdam shows unusual films, and
some of its members are engaged in making interesting
and experimental pictures.

135

INDEX

(FOR FILMS SEE SEPARATE LIST)

AlexandroiT. 70

Babynin. 85
Baranovskaya. 51-7, 80
Barnet. 105-8
Batalof. 51, 73, 00, 108
Belgoskino. 112
Beresof. 92
Blakeston. 112
Bliokh. 125
Brunei. 99

Chocklova. 23
Cberviakofl'. 92-i
Chistiakoff. 57
Chuvelef. 57, 60
Cin«^ Club de Geneve. 104
Close Up. 24, 70-9, 81, 92,
100-12, 117-32-33

Derussa. 56, 89, 92-1-7-9,

105-11-12-15
Doller. 56
Dovenkof- 103-4

Eggcrt. 14

Eisenstein. 9, 15, 27-43, 60-1,
70-2, 111

Ermolensky. 115
136

Film Liga. 70
Film Society. 14-5, 51, 61
Film Tcchnik. 29
Fogel. 22, 73, 95, 105-8
Freud. 26, 28, 71

(iardin. 85, 92, 111-12 ,

Golovnia. 56
Gorki. 49

Gos Kino. 21, 85, 117
Gosvoyenkino. 13, 14, 114-16,
118

Griffith. Ill
Grinyeef. 103

H.D. 24

Ivanovsky. 114 t

Inkischinof. 62

Jones. 48
Jeliabushky. 14, 91

Kiev. 99, 104
Konsintzoff. 114
Kowal-Samborski. 95, 105-6
Kuleshof. 18-24, 44, 71, 105

Libkin. 117

INDEX

Macpherson. 79, 81, 100, 103
Meschrabpom-Riiss. 13, 14,
44, 50, 04-7, 105,

116

Meyer hold. 29, 81
Mexican Studio. 29, 39
Minin. 102
Mitschurin. 92
Modern Books. 30
Montagu. 45, 99
Moskvin. 14, 94

Xademsky. 103-4

Obolensky. 57
Ozep. 70, 95-8

Pabst. 44-5, 51
Pavlof. 29, 44-5, 47
Pear. 123
^oselsky. 116-17
Pushkin. 110-11
Viobrashenskaya. 11, 84-91
role! Kult. 39

Vometheus. .17, 76, 108-9, 125
Votasanot. 105, IPJ-Pl
^udovkin, JJ, 22-8, 3*8, 41-1,
70, 97

Pusbnava. SfJ

Ra^mann. 115
Raioumni. 117
Reed. 50

R^om. 71-83, 111
Russiche Handelsvertretung.
45, 79, 118-24 ^

Saniytchkovskv. 102
Savilief. 126 '

Semenova. 73
Shub. 117-18

Sovkino. 14, 49, 81, 94,

109-10, 114, 117
Stabavoi. 99, 102, 111
Sten. 92, 94-5, 105, 113
Studio 133

raritsch. 109-10
Times. 125

Times Ed. S. 11, 41, 55, 68
I'is.sc. 39
Tokarska. 99
Tolstoy. 97, ll->

IVauberg. 1 I 4

Ukraine. IG, 99

V'erlol. 126, 127
Voks. 105, 122

Werner. 115
Woizek. 108-10
Wufkii. 85, 99-104

Zessarskava. 86

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